Because goods manufactured in Asia are artificially cheap, they soon displace products made by European and American factories in their home markets. To stay in business, low-margin manufacturers in Europe and the United States relocate their production facilities to Asia.

With exports booming and imports limited to raw materials and capital goods that Asian countries cannot yet make themselves, the region's trade surpluses balloon.

In order to maintain the under-valuation of regional currencies, Asian central banks step up their currency intervention, buying up ever-increasing quantities of foreign currency trade receipts.

This creates a powerful double positive feed-back loop. In buying up export receipts, central banks sell large amounts of local currency, injecting more and more money into Asia's domestic economies where they can fund further investment in manufacturing capacity.

With access to lashings of free capital, Asia's export industries begin rapidly to move up the value curve, producing more sophisticated, higher-margin goods for export. Trade surpluses increase even faster.

At the same time, Asian central banks use their fast-growing foreign reserves to buy up the government debt of developed countries. This holds down long-term interest rates in the rich economies, encouraging consumers there to leverage up and embark on a massive spending spree to buy ever more goods made in Asia.

Profligacy is catching. Before long it is not just rich world consumers that are taking advantage of low long-term interest rates to borrow, buy new houses and kit them out with expensive stuff. Financial institutions get in on the act, slicing and dicing debt a thousand different ways for a percentage of the take each time. It is a bubble, and it bursts.

This is the moment the conspirators have been waiting for. Up until now they have allocated their vast stash of foreign currency almost entirely to debt markets, together with some relatively small equity stakes in overseas resource producers.

Now, with bank shares hammered by the crisis and prices in other market segments weighed down by the threat of slower growth or even outright recession, Asian reserve managers begin to switch their foreign currency allocations into equity, snapping up cheap stakes in developed country companies.

With almost US$4 trillion in combined reserves, their money buys a lot of stock, exerting Asia's influence across the world on an unprecedented scale.

Increasingly Asian governments call the shots, whether the rest of the world likes it or not.

In reality, of course, there is no such conspiracy, although that is not the conclusion you would reach judging from some of the commentary around at the moment.

In fact Asian governments amassed their reserves as a prudent response to the Asian crisis and as a result of the reasonable conclusion that exporting goods to rich people in developed countries is more profitable than trying to sell to your own relatively poor populations.

Now Asian central banks have more reserves than they need and are able to allocate a portion to relatively illiquid but potentially higher-yielding equity investments which helps to support stock prices in the rest of the world.

It might make more sense if the critics were grateful but then gratitude is not as much fun as weaving elaborate conspiracy theories.

Asian governments amassed their reserves as a prudent response to the Asian crisis