Warren Buffett’s magisterial dictum about the aftermath of financial booms has now become conventional wisdom: only when the tide has receded can you see who has been swimming naked.

In the case of emerging market countries who have spent years wallowing in cheap money, however, the issue is complicated by the changing identity of the bathers in the water.

Traditional debt busts in emerging markets, from the Latin American crisis of the 1980s to the Asian financial turmoil of the late 1990s, generally used to be centred on sovereign bonds, usually contracted in dollars and often linked to the collapse of a currency peg. But the build-up of debt in emerging markets over the past decade has been disproportionately concentrated in the corporate sector , often in local currency. Total private sector debt in emerging markets is now equal to more than 100 per cent of annual gross domestic product, higher even than it was in developed economies on the brink of the global financial crisis in 2008.