Edmond Halley, of comet fame, also created an early actuarial table of life expectancy, allowing policy sellers to estimate their risks. Partly as a result, insurance in the west is a staid, conservative business. In China, it is rather racier. One insurer, Anbang, has amassed so much capital so quickly that the government has intervened, detaining its chairman Wu Xiaohui. A strong, independent insurance regulator would have become involved much earlier.

Insurance is big business in China. Premiums there jumped to Rmb3.1tn ($456bn) last year, up 82 per cent in just three years. It should soon surpass Japan’s more established industry as number two worldwide. That surge is not just down to low penetration of insurance products in China. Short-term, high-yielding investment products can masquerade as insurance. Using these, aggressive unlisted insurers such as Anbang and Foresea Life have amassed capital very quickly.

Both Anbang and Foresea have funded acquisitions via their insurance businesses for years. Rumours abound of the political connections their chairmen have. True, all insurers need to deploy the capital they accumulate. But Anbang has spent over $10bn in a couple of years on such assets as the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. The fact that Anbang may well have mismatched its short-term liabilities with long-term, illiquid asset purchases should have been a concern earlier.