Another songbird has toppled off its perch. Singapore, the first canary to succumb to the carbon monoxide poisoning of dwindling world trade, may shrink a ghastly 5 per cent this year. Now Taiwan, another export-dependent economy gasping for survival, has gone one worse: its gross domestic product fell 8.4 per cent in the fourth quarter, an annualised contraction, seasonally adjusted, of an alarming 22 per cent.

Taiwan’s collapsing output has highlighted its vulnerability to outside events. If Asia is the world’s factory, then Taiwan is the factory’s factory, producing the chips and flat screens that go into the branded products no longer being sold by Chinese, South Korean and Japanese manufacturers.