Cometh the crisis, cometh the saviour. Or, in the acronym-rich world of global economic governance, cometh the IFIs. (International financial institutions, that is.)

At least, that is how it has worked before. Great changes in the way that the economy was regulated and managed were often provoked by cataclysmic upheaval. It was to finance military expeditions in Europe that the English invented central banking in 1694; it was to fund the Napoleonic wars that Britain invented the modern income tax.

And it was the Great Depression, followed by the second world war, that produced the framework we broadly have today: the International Monetary Fund for crisis lending, the World Bank for development aid and the World Trade Organisation to negotiate and arbitrate the rules of trade.