Those with a taste for schadenfreude will relish tales such as that of Mukesh Ambani. India's richest man has seen the value of his Reliance companies fall by $53bn this year. Larry Yung, son of former Chinese vice-president Rong Yiren and the original “red tycoon”, used to have $2.7bn worth of shares in Hong Kong-listed Citic Pacific. That was before the conglomerate's Aussie dollar derivatives blew up: as of Friday, Mr Yung's 19 per cent stake was worth a mere $300m-odd. Then there is paper queen Zhang Yin, who topped China's rich list in 2006. By September 1, she was down $8.6bn at $2.6bn; since then, the bulk of that has evaporated along with Nine Dragons Paper's share price.
Unlike Russia, however, Indian and Chinese oligarchs' pain is unlikely to redraw ownership of assets. For one, wealth erosion is largely on paper – barely leveraged in most cases – and gains have disappeared only slightly faster than they were created. The Indian market has lost just over half its value this year while Shanghai is down by two-thirds. But that only takes them to the levels of two years ago. Second, these tycoons never commanded the economy to anything like the extent of their Russian peers – especially in China, the state still has a firm grip on the reins. Indeed, far from liquidating assets, the chat over banquets in Shanghai and Beijing is how to snaffle bigger bargains overseas. Poorer, perhaps; but, once an entrepreneur, always so.