Some report elsewhere whatever is told them; the measure of fiction always increases, and each fresh narrator adds something to what he has heard. (Ovid, Metamorphoses)

Vicious rumours recently almost drove a British bank off a cliff. Could that happen to a country? Probably not to the US, the UK or Germany. But it could happen to a small country of which most of us know little. In fact, last week it almost did happen to one when Iceland’s krona once again came under speculative attack, prompting the country’s central bank to raise interest rates by 1.25 percentage points to 15 per cent.