One can sympathise with that view even if economics dictates that China's saving habit had to be balanced by excess spending somewhere else. Yet rather than assigning blame – although that is always fun – it is important to grasp that China and the rest of Asia cannot continue along the same road. Americans are too broke to resume their role as Asia's demand engine.

To see why, look at US personal consumption, which hovered around 67 per cent of gross domestic product in the last quarter of the 20th century. That was already high by the standards of the previous 25 years. But from 2000 to 2008, it shot up again to an unprecedented 72 per cent. That trend has now gone into painful reverse. As Stephen Roach, chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, notes wryly: “We are already all the way down to 71 per cent.” In other words, it will be a very long time before Americans are again filling up their shopping carts.

Asians must either make less stuff and spend more time cutting each other's hair, or they must buy more themselves. Either way, households will have to increase spending. But things have been going in the wrong direction. Assumptions about the region's swelling middle class notwithstanding, consumption as a proportion of a fast-rising GDP has been falling – and swiftly at that.