On Wall Street and in the once-shimmering financial capitals of Europe, banks have been shaken to their foundations. Barring a few winners, such as Goldman Sachs – able, in the absence of rivals, “to Hoover up $1,000 bills”, as one observer put it – most western financial institutions have been brought to their knees. Many are now wards of state. Others have been absorbed by rivals, broken up or forced to beg for capital from taxpayers and foreign institutions.

But if western banks have been turned upside down, in Asia, precisely the opposite has happened: they have been turned downside up. A year after the Lehman implosion, four of the world’s top 10 banks by market capitalisation are Chinese. This April, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China became the largest in the world by deposits, at about $1,300bn, surpassing JPMorgan Chase and Mitsubishi UFJ. (By assets, highly leveraged western banks are still bigger.) Compare this with 2006, when seven of the top 10 banks were western and the only Asian representatives were Japanese.