He is not alone. The Argentine peso, an old target of the currency markets, is down by 16pc this year, and yet President Alberto Fernández remains in power. The Chilean peso is down by 12pc, yet there are few signs that the plunge has any real political cost, although that may change in elections next month.
Investors may be nervous about Poland’s rows with the EU, making it the fifth worst-performing emerging markets currency in the world, but there is no sign that anyone in Warsaw cares in the least, nor will anyone in Moscow be worrying much about how the markets might react to its aggressiveness along its border with Ukraine. What the markets do doesn’t matter.
That is a huge change. A generation ago, even major developed countries such as the UK lived in fear of the markets turning against them.
In Harold Wilson’s governments of the 1960s, plagued by currency crises, “the gnomes of Zurich”, slang for the currency traders, were denounced but ultimately obeyed, while through the 1990s legendary speculators such as George Soros could bring whole currency systems crashing down overnight by shifting their funds from one place to another.
The verdict of the global capital markets was always final. Lose their support and you were toast.
Look, comparing the effects of FX changes is a fixed rate currency system with that in a floating rate system is nonce boy twattishness.
And yet these are the people who write the newspapers for us.
It’s also worth keeping in mind the distinction between fundamentals like inflation and sentiment like sabre-rattling from Brussels (oops, no sabre!).
When the readers and writers of modern media are equally thick–or in competition to see who is the thickest–these “articles” are the kind of drivel that will result. A thick nation will have a thick press.
That the dead tree press is dying is therefore a good sign. Save the Net has its own morons on the job.