Empire lost

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: seemed out of place in Britain or America. But in Germany they are deeply distrusted. In one of his last interviews Mr Merckle bristled at comparison between his firm and hedge funds, telling the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a German newspaper, that he was trying to fund sound companies, but had been “lumped together with hedge funds.”

Yet despite Mr Merckle’s coyness and the still insalubrious reputation in Germany of private equity and hedge funds, these business models are in fact steadily gaining ground. So Mr Merckle was not quite as much of an exception as he might have seemed, says Wolfgang Gerke, a finance professor at the Bavarian Finance Centre in Munich. The big difference between him and Germany’s new managerial class, says Mr Gerke, was not that he took risks and they did not, but that when he got it wrong, “he paid with his life.”