drive up the dollar value of its foreign-currency denominated assets, thereby enabling it to erase its deficit with the world almost at a stroke.

Any sudden moves, however, threaten disaster. Far preferable is a gradual unwinding. Countries now throwing their savings at the United States should begin investing in their own countries. China's investment opportunities alone seem endless: cleaning up its environment, relieving rural property, ending the savage one child policy and developing its domestic markets. Anything but buying yet more US T-bills.

America is helping the unwinding along by plunging into recession and making itself considerably less attractive to investors. Now all those Asian and Latin American countries, notably Brazil, which have been leaning on the United States these past few years, need to use their savings to turn themselves into thriving domestic markets, not merely low-cost export engines. Thus, the world's economy can rebalance and we will see proper financial globalisation in which America is relieved of its role as the market and lender of first, middle and last resort.

It's a lovely idea. But is it workable? Reading any economic commentator, Wolf included, is an inevitably unsatisfying experience as the task of summarising the forces which shape our economic lives is simply beyond the human mind. The whole is never quite visible.

To bring about what Wolf proposes will require nerve and counter-intuition from those countries with heaps of surplus savings to spend rather than hoard to get through this financial winter.

But the Americans, and to an extent the British, did their part by piling up loans for these countries to acquire as secure assets. To complete this financial triple Axel, it's over to you, Beijing.