My eye was caught by some remarks in another paper from an unnamed banker. Taylor Wimpey is attempting a refinancing ahead of possibly hitting the buffers on its borrowing covenants early next year. Our banker was suggesting that vulture funds have been picking up some of the company's £450 million corporate bonds with a view to making mischief during the restructuring and so being paid to go away.

The company says that there is no conclusive evidence that the vultures are circling, though it is not always easy to track trades in bonds. Anyone with a memory of some of the huge corporate restructurings of the early 1990s, made immeasurably more arduous and expensive by the antics of such funds, will appreciate that this is a fashion from that time that, like baseball caps worn the wrong way round, we should not wish to see revived.

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