There are things in markets that are not meant to happen. Yet 2005 was a year in which many such things did happen. For a start, official figures from the US Treasury last week showed net foreign capital flows into the world’s richest economy continued to hit new records, with developing countries contributing busily. This reverses the usual logic of economic development whereby the rich are meant to save and lend while the poor borrow and spend.

You would hardly know it, listening to the trade policy debate on Capitol Hill, but this extraordinary gesture from the world’s poor to the rich has delivered a monstrously big dividend to US home owners in lower borrowing costs and rising house prices. It has also been a boon for the financial sector, which has been able to transfer the credit risk in home loans to international investors. That risk is, incidentally, increasingly embedded in very toxic home loan packages where borrowers chip in less and less of their own money.