Life has changed for market participants over the past year. More time for reflection, less champagne. I completely underestimated the response to my offer of a bottle of bubbly for the best word to describe the bear market analogue of a bubble. Before dawn had broken in London, entries from Asia were speeding over the internet. Several hundred e-mails later, suggestions are still trickling in.

I thought it might be appropriate to base the rules on the interwar newspaper beauty competitions famously described by John Maynard Keynes, in which the winner was the contestant who chose the six faces most popular with all contestants. The result, Keynes observed, was that the task was not to choose the most beautiful face, but the face that average opinion would think that average opinion would find the most beautiful. In this way beliefs feed on themselves and become divorced from any underlying reality.