Financial Crisis Management 101: The Deep Bow (tears optional)

It is no bloody fun, let me tell you, being sneered-at by a South Korean bureaucrat. Even when they're paying for lunch at Nobu.

But that, it seems, is the price you pay nowadays for being both British and a financial journalist: all sorts of people around the world, especially emerging market economies in Asia, are beginning to wonder why the hell they ever gave a hoot about what we thought. The following is a slightly compressed version of a lunchtime rant from a very senior Finance Ministry suit who had flown in from Seoul for a couple of days. It very nearly ruined the soft-shell crab spring rolls.

"We took advice from Wall Street and the City; we did one thing one year and a different thing 10 years later because Anglo-Saxon capitalists changed their mind about the correct medicine; we even visited your Financial Services Authority in London because it was supposed to be the perfect model of how a regulator should be structured. Well, it was all wrong. Just look at the British banks."

Ah.