What do securitised mortgages and manufacturing supply chains have in common? Not a lot, it may seem. After all, the art of repackaging debt is part of the arcane field of complex finance, while the business of shipping widgets round the world is a tangible, get-your-hands-dirty activity.

But in one respect complex finance and modern manufacturing have much in common: namely their embrace of globalisation. Western manufacturing has become ever more dependent on cross-border systems of production intended to make business more efficient, by placing each stage of production in the region where it can be most profitably performed. Likewise, western finance has embraced a vision of globally integrated capital markets in the name of more efficient banking.

The recent financial turmoil has shattered many of the previous assumptions in the 21st-century banking world. It has become painfully clear that moving credit risk round the world in complex chains did not make the system safer and more efficient – as bankers once claimed.