Just how well acquainted are New Zealanders with what is taking place in the international economy? We suspect the answer is "not very".
Here is a selection of global headlines from one day this week: "2 billion loss faced by Toyota"; "Norway's central bank warns on stability"; "House prices in UK will plunge 30%"; "Ireland to rescue banks"; "$50 billion US investment scam"; "Economic storm batters Argentina"; "Fleeing investors put strain on funds"; "Pound to be left to its fate"; "Nordic nations face crisis"; "Trillion pound debt racked up by pension funds"; "America split over battle to save car makers"; "Japan economy to contract"; "Middle classes squeezed as they put spending on hold".
The news, in short, is almost all bad and it is getting worse by the day.
Our own economy, which is based on world trade and tourism, cannot avoid being damaged.
We should all be taking notice.
Somebody else being squeezed by the crisis is Queen Elizabeth.
Being a practical person, she has also been taking steps to respond to the need for economising: she has invited the Royal Family to follow her example and tighten purse strings during the recession.
According to the British newspapers she has warned her grandsons that all ostentatious signs of living it up would be inappropriate.
She insists the Buckingham Palace lights are turned off when rooms are vacated, and that left-overs from banquets are re-used.
Her annual household expenditure has more than halved in 25 years.
And, while etiquette demands that the Queen never wears the same dress twice, she has recently chosen to ignore tradition by recycling from her wardrobe.
During a recent visit to the London School of Economics - where else - she called the world financial situation "awful" and asked the assembled dons: "Why did nobody notice it?"It is a very good question, one being asked in many households.
A part of the answer may lie in a recently published book, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, by the Scottish historian, Niall Ferguson.
Prof Ferguson reminds us that finance has rescued mankind from "wretched subsistence" and taken us to the "giddy heights of material prosperity".
The ascent of money and financial innovation, he argues, has been essential to the ascent of man - but money is not some metallic object: it is trust inscribed.
The system of finance harvests the potential energy of money and binds people and institutions into new relationships, such as the tie between lender and borrower.
But we are now in a new phase of "financial derangement", caused by debt.
Credit and leverage-buying of property and other assets have become detached from tangible economic growth on the presumption that prices would continue to rise for evermore and save all debtors.
The European Central Bank president, Jean-Claude Trichet, a notable commentator on money matters, recently used a simple metaphor to describe the crisis: it was as if we had been keen on eliminating a number of airbags from the car, yet now that we have an accident, we are surprised to see that we have a lot of scars.
In other words, global capitalism has been driven in a reckless fashion for a very long time and it was time for policymakers to re-read the forgotten highway code.
He believes the world is paying a price for the absence during a long period of time of "appropriate balances" in the various economies.
He said policymakers have an overwhelming duty to eliminate, as completely as possible, all the inbuilt elements in global finance that amplify the booms and the busts: the trust which was put in to the resilience of the market economy is now at stake.
Both these views boil down to one simple concept: economic growth must be real.
Elsewhere, Prof Ferguson has explained that the tremendous expansion in borrowing and lending meant, in essence, that the rest of the world's savings had helped inflate a real estate bubble in the United States.
"Easy money was (as is nearly always the case in asset bubbles) accompanied by lax lending standards and downright fraud.
Euphoria eventually gave way to distress and then to panic."
He noted "the hubris of recent years has certainly been followed by a terrible financial nemesis . . . like so much else made in the United States, this nemesis is proving an all-too-successful export".
What began as a crisis in the United States is now very rapidly becoming a world crisis, for which no-one can accurately forecast a conclusion.
Indeed, many commentators openly wonder if lasting solutions exist, for this is all unknown territory.
Did anyone forecast its arrival? The answer to the Queen's question is that many did, but they were largely ignored.
Without the benefit of hindsight and in the irrational grip of the chimera of perpetual prosperity, most simply rode the credit bubble and ignored the repeated lesson of history: bubbles always burst.
