These days ordinary people in the street cannot go to the toilet without reading about the global financial crisis. Watching the news seems like the end of the world, and it should be for the Swinging Dicks who have gotten multimillion dollar bonuses for managing so much money, even when they juggle it till it crashes.

Yet for China Central TV English news there is something else called the real economy which goes on and may only be marginally affected by the thrashing about of the bankers and fund gamblers.

An alien observer in space would see most people going about their daily business and certainly eating almost the same, and maybe laughing and loving just as much. Basic life has not changed for most people, and those hurt are only those caught up in the extremes of cavalier lending and investment, and including as a flow-on, those ordinary workers unknowingly serving the pandered delusions of the financiers and their sub-sub-very-subprime borrowers.