Financial markets are remarkably myopic. Faced with a choice between paying attention to the risk of nuclear war next year and the prospect of the US non-farm payroll number, out at, say, 1.30 tomorrow, the non-farm payroll number wins hands down every time.

This is not altogether daft. How should you cope with things utterly uncertain? The markets do it either by ignoring them altogether or by adopting a conventional assumption – usually the comfortable continuation of the status quo.

History tells us that most of the time things do indeed continue much as they were before. Yet sometimes big things happen. The US stock market did crash in 1929; the Second World War did break out in 1939; the Soviet Union did break up in 1991; there was a financial crisis in 2008; and the UK did vote to leave the EU in June of this year.

It should not come as a surprise that the markets barely reacted to the result of the referendum on Mr Renzi’s proposed constitutional reforms for Italy and his subsequent resignation. After all, even the opinion polls called this result correctly and the financial markets foresaw it more clearly.

That does not mean, though, that they are right to be sanguine. The prospect of an Italian euro exit is now much closer. Barring a miracle, the best that can be hoped for the Italian economy is that it will stagger on with minimal growth and continued high levels of unemployment. But if it were to suffer a serious shock, deriving from either the domestic banking sector or the world economy, then the country would be plunged back into recession.