In spite of the period of relative peace in recent years among emerging markets, the private armies of global finance have grown much faster than the fund's store of ammunition.

The IMF, headed by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has about $200bn in easily reachable money and another $50bn or so it can access rapidly. But Simon Johnson, a former IMF chief economist now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that is relatively small. “Maybe if the IMF had two trillion dollars it could be a serious global player,” he says. “But $200bn can go very quickly. There are a lot of countries in the same position as Ukraine, and you only need to add one or two of the really big countries to use it up.” Mr Johnson reckons that with other countries also in trouble, the IMF has probably already had to pencil in committing about a quarter of its $200bn over the next few months.

Despite a long and sometimes fractious discussion about funding and governing the IMF (see sidebar), it has not kept pace with the rapid rise in the size of global capital markets. Countries in trouble are normally supposed to be limited to three times “quota”, or their own financial contribution to the fund. Ukraine's loan was eight times its quota; Iceland's 11 times bigger.