London house prices are a better guide to how the world sees us than Moody’s ratings

‘There are two superpowers in the world today,’ said the American columnist Thomas Friedman in 1996. ‘There’s the United States and there’s Moody’s bond rating service. The US can destroy you by dropping bombs, and Moody’s can destroy you by downgrading your bonds.’ Well, not any more. Last Friday’s removal of triple-A status from British government debt may have made for a tense weekend chez Osborne and provoked short-selling of sterling by traders who thought it an obvious bet at a time when the Bank of England would clearly prefer a cheaper pound to boost exports.