Think about that for a second: because the Eurozone lent too much cheap money – and Athenian legislators then spent it like a bunch of Poolswinners; and because some French sky-pilot took the Goldman ethic to even greater extremes of avaricious insanity in the US – the dealers in downtown Shanghai buy less pork belly futures, or whatever it is they worry about over there.

Gold is currently up again at $1177. As a heavy investor in it, I’m a happy bunny (having got in a $818,), but I am also that confused Watership rabbit left wondering why on earth the mad schemes of fat people in Brussels should push up the price of something mined in South Africa which has very few practical uses beyond teeth and wedding rings.

The day after our May 6th General Election – just one hour afterwards to be precise – the Liffe bond futures market in London will be opening (at one am) for an all-nighter screening of the various scenarios which might unfold from the election results. Participants will be able to bet, sorry, have a punt, sorry, spread-bet, sorry, hedge against this or that outcome. It promises to be a cross between bullfighting, bear-baiting and cock-length tournaments; and it is also the point at which I draw the line.

I have opposed the half-baked concept of globalism ever since Theodore Levitt and his admirers Charlie & Maurice Saatchi declared it the secret of eternal wealth around 1982. The idea is nothing but a carelessly concocted series of rationalisations for doing crazy things, supported for example by statements like, ‘the person in the XVth arondissement of Paris has more in common with someone in Manhatten than with somebody from the XIVth’. For complete tosh, that’s hard to beat.

Globalism has a million more arguments against it that are far more erudite than that one, but its chief problems are twofold: randomness, and complexity. The button mistakenly pressed by a pillock in Pennsylvania can ruin the life of a peasant in Pa Peng. And the liquidity pool into which that error plunged is too deep and dark for any mortal brain to follow. We would all do well to remember that even today – two and a half years after the event – nobody is entirely sure whether Greenspan dollar-printing or Kentucky money-lending ’caused’ a global econo-fiscal collapse. But what we can say with certainty – even at a level to satisfy the anti-Warmist lobby – is that the disaster was entirely man-made.

Let us for a brief time compare random confusion with commonsense simplicity. Domino Theory is a very easy concept to follow: if you leave lots of dominoes in a row next to each other, and then prod the end one with a total lack of sensitivity, the others will all fall down. And when it comes to global financing of globalist economics, this is all you need to know.

There is nothing Luddite in wanting to scale down the nature of commerce. We cannot uninvent the ability to talk for next to nothing to relatives and friends in Peru and Australia – and nor should we: this facility is a boon for which we should be eternally grateful. But because I want to talk to my daughter in Sydney, does this mean my Prime Minister’s odd personality should condemn her workmates to higher taxes? The idea is ridiculous.

What the last three years should have taught us is that international trade interdependence needs to be tempered by national self-sufficiency. This doesn’t mean the pejorative ‘siege economy’ boo-term so beloved of the Left; rather, it means taking a long, cool look at Germany.

The Bundesrepublik sells to everyone and is the member of a powerful trading union. But it has never forgotten the first diktat for every government anywhere: to protect its citizens from the maximum number of outrageous arrows. Not to make that People exempt from the consequences of their own stupidity, but to ensure that random misfortune is foreseen and, where possible, avoided.

Communicating and connecting with fellow species-members is always a good thing. Falling into commercial dependency is every bit as harmful as sinking into welfare dependency.