Britain has indeed had a certain number of sterling crises in the past. It’s not going to have one now. We say that in absolute and full confidence:

By UK standards, what has happened in the past few weeks qualifies as a wobble rather than a full-blown crisis of the sort that forced sterling off the Gold Standard in 1931 or out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism by speculators led by George Soros on Black Wednesday 30 years ago this year.

Nor was the sell-off as serious as that seen in 1976, the crisis that persuaded the then Labour government to ask for financial support from the International Monetary Fund. For the pound’s current weakness to become as legendary as 1931, 1976, 1992 or the postwar devaluations of 1949 and 1967, it would have to fall from today’s level of about $1.23 against the US dollar to parity, where £1 buys $1.

Yes, this is The Guardian so obviously the important economic points are going to be missed.

But in all of those previous instances the government - or the Bank of England, take your pick - was committed to trying to maintain a certain price for sterling. The crisis was always when the pressure became such that the price couldn’t be maintained.

Today we might well have some sort of idea what is a desirable exchange rate - or we might not. But we’ve no public commitment to one and thus it cannot be that pressure will break it. Therefore we’re not going to have a sterling crisis.

After all, a fixed price can only be broken if there is a fixed price that someone is trying to maintain.

The Guardian lists 5 different sterling crises there. All of them reliant upon the government (or BoE) trying to insist that prices were different from what reality said they were. In the absence of government trying to defy reality there are no crises. Sadly, this being The Guardian not only have they failed to note that they also then go on to insist that government should fix the price of labour, of energy, of whatever else they think would be better if reality were kept at bay.

Sigh. For in any battle between government prices and the real world it is that universe out there that wins, always.