With his drooping moustache and glasses he could have stepped out of a President Teddy Roosevelt lookalike competition. But I was relieved to see that it was not a wasted journey. McCulley is one of the top three executives at Pimco, the largest specialist fixed interest fund manager in the world.

He turned out to be not so different from Ray McCauley after all. He is the son of a Baptist minister who taught him that all speeches or sermons should cover three areas: do good, turn away from evil and give more money. In fund management terms, the equivalent message would be: invest long-term, avoid speculation and give us more money to manage.

McCulley isn’t a capitalist red in tooth and claw; he does not think it was appropriate for former president Bush to cut the marginal tax rate from 39% to 36%. He believes that national health care is affordable in the US provided that people who can afford health care contribute more. At the moment millions of people who can afford to pay are claiming from free government programmes such as Medicare.

Few raw capitalists are on the speaking circuit at the moment, and McCulley, as a preacher’s son, is perfectly cast as a poster boy for born-again, caring, capitalism lite. He says the old world was all about excess - following the dictum of the flamboyant actress Mae West, that if a little is great and a lot is better then way too much is just about right.

For McCulley, everything comes in threes; and the three characteristics of capitalism from 1980 to 2008 (what he calls "the old normal") were deregulation, globalisation and the increased use of leverage. But eventually this party spins out of control until it comes to a point known as "the Minsky moment". I had always thought this was the name of a cult film by the Coen Brothers, a sequel to The Big Lebowski. But it is a phrase coined by McCulley in tribute to the economist Hyman Minsky. It is the point at which investors have so much debt on their balance sheets that they have no choice but to start disposing of assets. McCulley says we must get used to a "new normal" in which returns will be modest - if we are lucky, between 4% and 7% a year - and credit will be much harder to source. As he says, drying out after the party is not a pleasant experience.