We sip wine, we gulp water. Good manners? Actually, basic economics. Water is relatively abundant and cheap, wine scarce and dear.

So if you’re a central banker, and you want folks to uncork their wine, you threaten to turn it into water (somebody already took the water-to-wine trick).

That’s essentially what many central bankers are doing: opening their cellars – or in this case, their vaults – and giving money away.

For its part, the Bank of England has created £175 billion of new money through ‘quantitative easing’ – buying assets from banks, thereby giving them cash. Factor in reduced interest rates, which should create new money by encouraging banks to lend more, plus government stimulus programmes. Add it all up, and such policies have pumped as much as US $30 trillion of new cash into the world economy.

Stack up that many dollar bills, and you’d get to the moon and back, four times. Now, just try to spend that. That’s the point. Print money faster than folks can make things to buy, and money will become cheap. Rather than watch our wealth evaporate, we’ll rush to spend our cash. And voila, the recession ends.

The problem is, too many of us have just come off a decade on the plonk. Spending outstripped incomes, debts rose, and we grew giddy on cheap money. Now, central banks are trying to push hair of the dog on us.

But there’s a problem. In a closed system, when you can either save or spend, and saving only depletes your wealth, for sure you’ll unload cash faster than it can disappear. But today’s economic systems aren’t closed.

Instead of getting zero interest on our savings, we can put them into ‘emerging-market’ funds though. The very poverty of the Third World means there are huge potential returns there. And policy changes in poor countries over the last couple of decades have created environments friendlier to business.

Is it any wonder, then, that a lot of this new money has been shipped out of the country? Institutional investors have been engaging in a ‘carry trade’. They borrow US dollars or pounds sterling cheap, then ship the money offshore. But this is not just a luxury market.

Retail investors have been putting money into mutual funds and, more recently, exchange-traded funds (ETFs). ETFs are funds that are broken up into units, which are themselves traded on exchanges. That makes it easy for small investors to enter and exit the market. Take Barclays’ ishares MSCI-emerging markets ETF, for instance: a punter who bought it at the start of the year will have made about a 60% return. Beats zero interest. But it also beats the FTSE 100 index, which has crawled barely over 10% since January. Not surprisingly, investors have been flooding in: Barclays’ emerging-market ETF has tripled its assets this year.

In the US, since the start of the year, ordinary investors have withdrawn about a tenth of their mutual-fund deposits in the local stock market, and have reallocated most of it to gold and emerging markets. In consequence, all ten of the fastest-rising stock markets this year are in developing countries, Peru leading the list.

Cheap wine can be bad wine. Make it too cheap, and we’ll start drinking pisco or caiprinhas instead.