Devaluation's common currency but it's nothing like it used to be Devaluation? Don't make me laugh. Let me tell you what a devaluation was. That was when the president or prime minister came on the wireless to announce to you that your money would be worth something different in the morning than it was today. They were quite precise about it - the value of a British or Irish pound changed from $2.80 to $2.40 in the case of Harold Wilson's 1967 devaluation. Like bus conductors and vinyl records, that kind of devaluation is a thing of the past. There was a European version for a time, but it was generally much less exciting. European leaders would confer secretly and announce a new range for a troubled currency. Somehow, a new "band" of 2.5% either way lacked the drama of a change to a fixed currency. But when things went wrong - most spectacularly with Britain's forced departure from the European exchange rate mechanism in 1991 - there was drama aplenty. There is drama aplenty again and the word "devaluation" swirls around in discussions of the euro crisis. But it has lost its real meaning. Without fixed rates to other currencies, there is really no such thing as devaluation. We should have noticed that, in a system of floating currencies, a country cannot decide the value of its currency. The markets decide. We should have noticed this not least because of the experience just across the water. With complete freedom