And in case you think this chart also shows that Thailand got over it, look at my second chart of a US dollar index of bank stocks on the Thai stock market. These bank share prices have barely risen back to a quarter of their 1996 peaks.

It really was a tsunami with all the surprise and shock of one. People who had been looking at the Thai stock market for a long time knew that trouble would come at some point but they didn't know when and the tsunami still rolled a lot of them over when it did come.

I recall the pre-launch hoopla in late-1995 of a big property company that consisted of a set of architect's plans valued at 2 per cent of Thailand's gross domestic product. I had my reservations about that one but I joined the chorus anyway when the Thai banks all vied for the business. Two years later it was a complete wipe-out and the banks were in the hands of a government financial asset disposal commission.

It's all so obvious in hindsight. It isn't at the time when everyone is still enthusiastic and gloom reports like the one I quote above fall to paragraph four of a short report at the bottom of an inside page.

I wonder if the board of Standard Chartered has the courage to back up the stance its economists take. Probably not. In finance you cannot afford to be gloomy and wrong for more than a few months. Longer than that and your job is on the line.

Here are some facts and conjectures on the state of China's financial system. We start with the total of credit funds in the system, including at the central bank, of 86.2 trillion yuan (HK$104.5 trillion).

Not all of it is available for loans, however. A whopping 25 trillion yuan is the backing for the more than US$3 trillion that China holds in reserves. The interest returns on this are very low, however, and every day that the yuan rises against the dollar this creates a bigger forex loss on these reserves. You would never want to hold anything like this in your personal portfolio.

The total in loans is 51.4 trillion yuan of which about 8.5 trillion yuan consists of the 2008/09 stimulus loans to local government. We shall call the whole of these a write-off. No? Well, then find me someone who thinks otherwise.

Next we get the 6 trillion yuan investment budget of the high-speed-railway system. The money was supposed to come from a range of diverse sources but it all comes from the banks and it will not be repaid. The fallout from the Wenzhou crash indicates that the system can at best cover its operating costs. That's another 6 trillion yuan gone.

Then there will be the inevitable and long put off property crash when the tsunami strikes. We shall estimate the NPL figure for this at one quarter of the accumulated investment in property over the last 10 years, excluding investment by government and foreign sources. This is conservative. We now have another 4.2 trillion yuan gone.

With all this in the pot I can easily see another 6 trillion yuan in NPL designations for other infrastructure projects, stock market investments, personal finance loans and general commerce and industrial lending.

We are now looking at the same sort of peak NPL ratios that my first chart on Thailand shows. Maybe we'll be lucky. Maybe this tsunami won't happen. But maybe it will. Don't live too near this shoreline.