Europe’s leaders spent the weekend trying to thrash out common positions on tax and market regulation. Over in Phuket, Asian finance ministers were making faster progress. Nine years ago, the biggest countries agreed to sign a series of bilateral swap agreements to prepare for the event that one of their number could not balance its books for a month or two. Today, Asia is proposing $120bn pool of foreign exchange reserves for subscribers to tap in extremis.

The pool – 50 per cent bigger than one outlined in May last year – is still small. Japan, China, Korea and the 10 Asean countries have more than $3,600bn in reserve assets; China on its own could fund the whole thing 16 times over. More important, however, is the statement of intent. Bilateral is becoming multilateral. Concerted action, in theory at least, provides a backstop to the kind of speculative attacks on currencies that rinsed away the reserves of Indonesia, Thailand and Korea a decade ago. Should the export slump continue, participants might be less inclined to engage in competitive devaluation.