IN the end, with just a few days of a tumultuous year to go, it took a billionaire showman to sum it up best.

At the opening of his new $2.3 billion (£1.6 billion) casino in Las Vegas last week, gambling boss Steve Wynn raised his voice above the bleeping chorus of the slot machines and addressed investors worried about the global downturn.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, lowering his voice to a stage whisper for dramatic effect. “The world’s bullshit is being repriced.”

Bullshit. The past 12 months have exposed mountains of the stuff, in Vegas and in those other casinos around the world: the City of London, Wall Street, Dubai and Mumbai. Myths were exploded faster than you could say “hot air”.

City eggheads, armed with their derivatives and rewarded with puffy bonuses, had not uncovered a new kind of financial alchemy. In fact, like the rest of us, they did not understand what they were doing. Banks turned out to be so bad at looking after money that some did not have any at all.

Products that once sold fast at ever-rising prices became, overnight, impossible to shift. A loft-style apartment in Leeds? No takers. Okay, how about a Hummer, one of Detroit’s biggest brands? Anyone?

Entire countries went bust in the time it took mum to go to Iceland. The same happened to communities. Recently, Mountain House, a small town in California, became the most indebted settlement in human history, with 90% of homeowners owing more on their mortgages than their houses were worth. Talk about credit-crunch city.

Sectors that were once viewed as recession-resistant, notably luxury goods and gambling, have been exposed as anything but. Las Vegas’s future is looking dicey and those discreet signs in boutiques on Bond Street, Via Montenapoleone and Rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré really do say what you think they say: SALE.

“Invulnerable” businesses announced their first losses, notably Toyota. Shares in Google, the most successful company in the history of modern capitalism, fell. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, once the master financial guns for hire, became mere commercial banks.

Even the new super-rich stumbled. A few months ago, the sheikhs of Dubai were fast-forwarding into the future. But their “I know, let’s start a country” plan was floating on a sea of borrowed money — almost 150% of GDP, as it turned out. Now the Gulf is swapping sunshine for sub-prime.

In the maelstrom, reputations have been shredded. Sir Fred Goodwin bet half of Edinburgh on Royal Bank of Scotland’s takeover of ABN Amro. Lehman Brothers’ Dick Fuld may have looked like Dr Evil but turned out to be Dr Stupid. Bernard Madoff became “the $50 billion man” — for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of ideas have been devalued, too. Decoupling, the notion that the rest of the world could get on just fine without the spender of last resort — America — was plain wrong. So was the idea that westerners could afford to be sniffy about sovereign wealth funds. Today, cash-strapped ministers and bankers are dashing to Abu Dhabi and Qatar to smoke the hubbly-bubbly shisha pipe.

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