Should we be sad or happy that the pound has buckled?

A wave to the FT team whose weekend feature on how the pound has been hit by fears of no deal began with this arresting sentence: ‘Sterling has finally buckled.’ I almost spilled my café crème as I read that in a sunlit French square and contemplated JP Morgan’s ‘conservative’ forecast of a $1.15 no-deal exchange rate, with a possible further 10 per cent fall beyond that, to compare with $1.50 before the referendum and ‘purchasing power parity’ (per UBS) of $1.57. As for the euro, more in a moment — but we’re already only a whisker from pound-euro parity.

Should we be upset by this decline of a national symbol whose name, sterling, also means ‘excellent or valuable’? Or should we accept a slide to lows rarely seen since the 1970s as a price worth paying to extract ourselves from Europe’s grip? There is, after all, an argument (advocated by the free–thinking tycoon John Mills, for one) that a radically devalued pound is the key to future prosperity, because it will ‘unleash’ export manufacturers and wipe out our longstanding trade deficit; it might bring inflation too, as import prices soar, but the Bank of England has the tools to deal with that.