A country with big budget and trade deficits, a weakening currency, a spendthrift culture, a financial sector lacking the skills and systems to manage the risks it has assumed and a banking sector that consistently extended credit to parties unable to repay it goes into financial crisis. The rest of the world, which holds currency and securities from the afflicted state, watches and wonders whether these regional problems will bring down the global economy.

This is, of course, a description of America’s credit crunch and the international response to it. But it is not a million miles away from the emerging markets ills – think the “tequila crisis” or Russia’s 1998 default and devaluation – that threatened the world economy in years past. Around the world, that resemblance hasn’t gone unnoticed. For some, it has inspired a but-for-the-grace-of-God feeling you might call relief. As Guillermo Ortiz, governor of the Mexican Central Bank, said last week at Davos: “I’m glad that this time we did not cause it.”