“Reality is far more vicious than Russian roulette. First, it delivers the fatal bullet rather infrequently, like a revolver that would have hundreds, even thousands of chambers, instead of six. After a few dozen tries, one forgets about the existence of a bullet, under a numbing false sense of security.”

Dubai World, the sovereign wealth fund that shoulders $US59 billion of the city state’s $US80 billion total debt pile, recently announced it was seeking extensions on its loan repayments. The All Ordinaries index fell 130 points as a result, the largest drop in more than five months. To those that had begun to develop a “numbing false sense of security” following the Australian sharemarket’s strong upward surge, it was a black-swan like shock.