Global political instability tends to help the dollar and it seems reasonable to expect an increasingly rough period in the Middle East in the coming months. The Japan story has some way to run too: things will get worse before they get better and that will also tend to help the dollar.Were the euro launch to be unsuccessful, that would of course confirm the dollar as the currency of choice for the world’s criminals and tax evaders. In fact it is hard to see random factors that might seriously undermine the dollar, and easy to see some that will support it.And the whole overshoot issue? I suppose the question here is whether the dollar is fundamentally overvalued at its present levels or whether it was actually rather undervalued during most of the 1980s and early 1990s. My intuitive guess is that it is a bit overvalued now, but not by more than 10 per cent. Parity with the euro? Eventually, yes; but not for a while yet.. Maintaining radio silence is something Marconi is good at.

The chief executive has gone on holiday for a fortnight and his former spokesman has been sent to Coventry. Meanwhile, analysts briefings have been cancelled and the market is working itself into a frenzy waiting for the next profits warning. Or is it the rescue rights issue?

Maintaining radio silence is something Marconi is good at. The chief executive has gone on holiday for a fortnight and his former spokesman has been sent to Coventry. Meanwhile, analysts briefings have been cancelled and the market is working itself into a frenzy waiting for the next profits warning. Or is it the rescue rights issue?
Lord Simpson is too busy playing golf to get to the nineteenth hole and make the telephone call that would kill the speculation. But his new spokesman helpfully suggests that the market should not expect to hear anything from the company for another month.

In a fast-moving world like telecoms where customer orders have a habit of melting away like summer snow, that is an age.Meanwhile, the rumour mill continues to grind to Marconi’s disadvantage The rot in the share price was temporarily halted yesterday. But enough damage looks to have been done already to force Marconi out of the FTSE-100 when the index is recalculated in September.Marconi only has itself to blame. The handling of the first profits warning was enough to make grown men weep. The old adage, of course, is that they come in threes and investors now fear that Marconi will bear it out in spades.The company blames the latest slippage in the share price on hedge funds racing to cover short positions. But that does not explain the Goldman Sachs downgrade on Tuesday, nor the gloomy prognosis for the European telecoms market which Cisco came out with last week.

The view is that there is more pain to come from Marconi on top of the 50 per cent fall in profits and 15 per cent decline in sales it finally owned up to in July.So a second profit warning looks a distinct possibility. A rescue rights, however, looks like the product of midsummer madness. Unless orders really have fallen off a cliff, then the business ought to generate operating cash this year and it still has £4bn of its £4.5bn credit facility left to draw on.The debt rating downgrades are a nuisance but they should not have any impact on the cost of servicing that debt since most of it is at fixed rates. John Mayo, the company’s former chief executive-designate, may not have covered himself in glory before he was forced out.