With the benefit of hindsight, trigger events for wider geopolitical and economic upheaval are always obvious. It’s easy to see them looking back, not so easy looking forward. Shocking though it was, the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne initially had very little impact. It was not until nations started declaring war, a month after the event, that markets became seriously rattled. Right up until the last moment, investors managed to convince themselves that things would turn out fine in the end.

Much the same point might be made about financial events. The collapse of Lehman’s, a comparatively minor investment bank, prompted the worst financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression. Few if any anticipated the scale of its impact. Similarly, the cascading series of banking collapses that marked the start of the Great Depression began with the failure of Creditanstalt, an Austrian bank that scarcely anyone had heard of at the time.

Looking at today’s events, a similar complacency afflicts investors and commentators as they weigh the carnage of the Middle East and the disgusting expansionism of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. I’ve lost count of the number of City reports I’ve read explaining why today’s geopolitical events don’t matter for financial markets.