Given all the financial troubles that the US is facing, you might expect the Chinese authorities to indulge in a spot of schadenfreude. Having sat through all those lectures about the need to liberalise financial markets and the importance of letting foreign investment banks do their stuff on Chinese turf, a certain amount of quiet satisfaction might be in order.

Indeed, as one Chinese official put it the other day: “The subprime market is very complicated. Chinese banks are not nearly sophisticated enough to make those sorts of mistakes.”