And the yen has to collapse to get some growth in Japan at last. Mathematically it is impossible for all currencies to go down and it may well be that in a few months, assuming a reasonable prospect of stability in the Middle East, that the dollar will again look the best of a bad bunch. We will see.The big point here, surely, is that we are trudging through the typical uncertainties associated with the trough of a recession. If you look back to the early 1970s there was huge disruption because of the surge in the oil price and the wider inflationary pressures of the time.

In the early 1980s there was another oil shock, companies going bust, and unemployment soaring. Here there was an untried government that was not at all sure it would survive. In the early 1990s there was the Gulf War and sterling's ill-fated membership of the ERM.All these were global downturns; all affected different countries to some extent but the scale and nature of the blow was different depending on the viewpoint. The position now of the US economy is in some ways relatively stronger than it was during those previous downturns.

In particular, productivity growth is better than in Europe or Japan, and the federal deficit so far at least, is narrower. True, the external deficit is wider but then investors have to ask which risk would they rather have.The State of the Union address is one of those tournaments that the President has to win The plain fact is that George W has done so It does not change the fundamentals in any way. But it helps rebuild confidence within the US and that is no bad thing.. YOU ASK Sophie Ellis Bextor, 22, is the daughter of ex-Blue Peter presenter Janet Ellis, and grew up in west London, where she went to Godolphin & Latymer School.