The global economic expansion is so well advanced that the investment community is understandably nervous, at the start of 2016, about a wide variety of risks. Geopolitics, cyber attacks, inflation, excessive debt, deflation — there is no shortage of lurking horrors to give professional investors sleepless nights. Stuff will undoubtedly happen, as Donald Rumsfeld, the former US defence secretary, might have put it. Yet I was interested to see in the recent annual review of potential banking banana skins from the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation that what bankers and others in the 52-country survey found most worrying was relatively prosaic: the possibility that the economic recovery would fail.

One of the interesting things about that concern is the extent to which it turns on emerging markets. Despite having suffered a protracted slowdown, emerging markets still accounted for 60 per cent of global growth between 2010 and 2014 and their share of global gross domestic product last year was over 57 per cent measured at international purchasing power parity. In 2015 and 2016 the International Monetary Fund expects emerging markets to grow at double the speed of the advanced countries, notwithstanding the difficulties that so many of them face.

To make a plausible projection of global growth, then, it is necessary to be on top of the emerging markets; and to make a plausible projection of emerging market growth you have to be on top of China, because it accounts for such a big chunk of the world economy. There lies one of the biggest question marks not only for growth but for financial stability in the developed world. For as the events of the last week have reminded us, market developments in China spill over to the rest of us. A smooth rebalancing and slowing of the Chinese economy is a prerequisite for continuing stable expansion everywhere else.