China’s leaders must be sorely tempted to activate the "nuclear option" and punish the capitalist running dog, the tango dancer in the White House.  

They could at any time start to liquidate their $1.2 trillion (£850bn) holdings of US Treasury debt, switching the proceeds into euro, sterling, krona, Aussie, or peso debt to stop the yuan exchange rate soaring.

Even a small dose of this financial arsenic would – in the minds of Beijing’s ultra-nationalist faction – set off a salutary panic. It would crater the US bond market at the very moment when Donald Trump’s fiscal depravity is driving the US budget deficit to a stratospheric $1 trillion.

The contagion would spread instantly through US mortgages...