As summer reaches its balmy peak, we City folk sashay our way down the wormhole connecting the City of London to the French Riviera. I arrived expecting more of the same – an excess of the bankers from whom I’m trying to escape, sketchy bimbos trying to pick them up, and extravagant parties “sous le soleil.”

But this summer, now expense accounts have all but vanished, the typical glitz and glamour have been turned down a notch. Instead of the usual cocktail conversation over what to do with next year’s bonus, it was chic to state proudly that you were absolutely certain to get zero. It was with sadness that I came to the realisation that the crunch in financial markets had, perhaps inevitably, also crimped the luxuriousness of the Cote d’Azur.

But I immediately snapped out of my penny-pinching slump when I uncovered another feature of the Mediterranean: Russians. Here is a nation of people who, for whatever reason, are completely oblivious to the fact that there is a “credit crunch.” Their wild spending is notorious, and whether it’s huge yachts in St Tropez or the Russian who set the record for Europe’s second most expensive house (behind Lakshmi Mittal’s in London) at a bargain £400m, these husky billionaires were the perfect antidote to the doom and gloom surrounding my colleagues in the City.

Last week, one Russian soiree took us back to the reverie of the good ol’ pre-crunch days. There were more than 500 people at this palatial villa, with an uninterrupted view of the sea, and a car park full of Bentleys, Lamborghinis and Aston Martins.

This world of decadence, once upon a time within the gift of London bankers, came with bottles of champagne spilling over virtually naked women; there were ballerinas shipped in from St Petersburg, models from Paris. But while this fantasy world of ever-flowing fizz in a filthy-rich paradise was entertaining for the weekend, it occurred to me that, bikinis aside, this scene was an accurate representation of the massive shift in financial power from West to East.

The City used to service posh Oxbridge guys, smoking cigars on Pall Mall. These days, those once-snooty Brits are selling off their Picassos to tycoons with names ending in “vich” and “off”. And as I boarded my plane back to London City airport, I wondered whether it was just a matter of time before the new Square Mile could be found in Red Square.