Occasionally the unthinkable has to be thought. 
After last winter it was inconceivable that my garden would ever need watering. How wrong I was; the bedding plants are looking more miserable than a Scottish tennis player and it was out with the hosepipe yesterday afternoon.
Now, with only 17 days to go the Leave Party appears to be edging into a late lead.
So just for fun, let us imagine that last week’s bookies’ odds of 1/6 prove to be wrong and more of us vote to leave than to stay. If current performance is a guide to the future (which we all know it isn’t), then the one thing that is sure to happen is that the pound will fall.
Relative performance of currencies in 2016 prior to today’s YouGov poll
Source: FE Analytics
How far and how fast is anyone’s guess. But fall it will.
You will know, of course, that the UK is running a bit of a current account deficit at the moment. This is primarily for two reasons: first we are importing a little more than we export, mostly because those dastardly Europeans aren’t buying as much of our stuff as we are of theirs.
Second, ‘primary income’ is having a bit of a nightmare. You are forgiven if you are not immediately familiar with primary income. In balance of payments terms, this is the difference between the dividends and income received from the UK’s investments overseas and what we pay out to those who have invested here.
At the moment, it is a huge outflow.
Traditional economic theory says that the readiest solution to this is a fall in the value of the currency. Job done. On we go.
The Bank of England, you will recall, has a mandate to keep CPI inflation within 1 per cent either side of a 2 per cent target. You will also recall that by and large its earnest endeavours have been fruitless.
As a quick tangent, this is almost certainly a good thing: inflation targeting, which started in the UK in 1998, needs to be given a long official breather. Whoever still thinks that steady inflation of 2 per cent is a desirable thing has no understanding whatsoever of the great financial crisis and its pivotal role in the near death of modern capitalism. On we go.
This is where things get terribly clever. As I said earlier, the UK is currently importing more than we export. 
One very simple way of raising the inflation rate is to make everything we import more expensive. Vote leave. Pound down. Job done.
You will all know that the creation we know as the UK stock market does not have much to do with the UK. Like the Premier League, it is crammed full of foreigners believing the streets of London are paved with gold (I’ll show you something to make you change your mind).
Calculating how much of the market’s revenues and profits are derived from overseas is more art than science. But for the sake of argument and approximation, let’s assume that it is 70 per cent.
A 10 per cent fall in the pound (all else being equal, which it isn’t), ought therefore to add 7 per cent to earnings. At a time when earnings growth is Sisyphean, this would be a gift. Down with the pound I say.
Before I get shot down in flames, everything I have just said ignores totally all the bad bits about trade deals.
It has to, as we do not know what will happen to these (though it is unlikely to be for the better).
This was merely a quick and simple run through of what is good from a market devaluation of sterling. It will only take one poll to show the Remainers back in the lead and it will all turn around again.
At the weekend I caught the most brilliant explanation of why Mrs Clinton will win the US presidential election.
She’ll get more votes.
OK, there is reason behind this: half of the Republican voters won’t vote for Trump. Equally, half Democrat voters won’t vote for Clinton: but when faced with the prospect of Trump, they will.
As the Scottish tennis player may be weary of hearing: game, set and match.
Last week’s economic data was not the greatest, especially Friday’s non-farm payrolls. These are likely to be called what statisticians ingeniously call an outlier. It is best not to judge one weird month before there is a clear trend.
It is though tricky to be able to put a more positive spin on it at the moment.
Jim Wood-Smith is head of research at Hawksmoor and writer of the group’s weekly ‘Innovation’ blog. All the views expressed above are his own and shouldn’t be taken as investment advice.
