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.

Or does it? Suppose the Bank feels the need, in response to a no-deal shock, to cut rates and even resort to quantitative easing (both inflationary) rather than raising rates to quell inflation? Suppose exporters are so impeded by customs chaos that they can’t sell more stuff abroad at any price? Suppose all we get are waves of speculators thrashing sterling and an invasion of bargain-hunting US investors — as seems to have begun with Advent’s bid for the Cobham aerospace group?