It’s doubtful that Don Trump has read Don Quixote. If he had, he’d avoid putting all his eggs in one basket, something Cervantes warned about in his early 17th century classic. What held true in the great Spanish bonanza of the 1600s, when Imperial Spain was dripping in Aztec gold and Inca silver, applies equally today. The expression perfectly describes the current situation in global financial markets where the US – home to 4 per cent of the world’s population – attracts roughly 60–65 per cent of all the world’s money going into stock markets, about 40 per cent that goes into bond markets and about 70 per cent of all the world’s private capital. All the world’s financial eggs are precariously perched in one highly speculative basket, in a country run by someone who could be described – sticking with the basket analogy – as a complete basket case.

This concentration of global risk in one country is a source of enormous jeopardy, particularly when you consider that the US only accounts for 2 per cent of the world’s population under 18. By definition, the US can’t absorb all this money profitably. Bizarrely, since the 2008 global financial crisis, when a catastrophe that originated in the US and was the result of poor regulation, dodgy financial oversight and a finance system that was out of control, the world has doubled down on its American bet. You’d expect the US to be punished and shunned by investors for orchestrating the greatest financial calamity since 1929, but the opposite has happened. On the eve of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, $10 trillion of foreign money was deployed in US shares, real estate and bonds. Today that figure is $30 trillion. Rather than recoiling from the country that caused the........

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