Whoo-oosh. That cheerful whistling sound of 2007, when capital was beating a path to Asia, has been replaced by the sucking sound of retreat. The Indian market has almost halved this year, taking the rupee – now at five-and-a-half-year lows – with it. South Korea has seen 12 per cent lopped off its currency against the dollar this week alone. The two countries’ current account deficits and erstwhile reliance on portfolio flows make them stand-out casualties, but other Asian currencies are also losing ground as risk capital goes to ground.

This is a different problem from that of the more developed world, where money is jammed up within the system rather than jumping continents. Both, however, bring a cost. Capital flight and central bank intervention has depleted foreign exchange reserves in Asia, excluding Japan and China, by $42bn over the past three months, according to Royal Bank of Scotland. Korea, which has stepped in repeatedly to shore up the won, has spent an estimated $40bn over the past two months in the spot and forward FX markets. That may not be huge in the context of its $240bn of foreign exchange reserves, but whittling back the dollar kitty escalates concerns about Korea’s $175bn of short-term liabilities. Rationally, these fears are probably overdone – a fair bit of those liabilities represent trades by onshore foreign banks, and are hedged – but rational behaviour has long since been abandoned.