If you want to read online the FT’s distinguished Lex column, you have to pay for it.

But at least Lex shares with us for free a nifty graph on the rouble’s fortunes up to and following the Kremlin’s Georgia intervention:

Russia’s 1998 financial crisis, after which one foreign banker observed he would rather “eat nuclear waste” than invest in Russian securities, is still alive in the market’s collective consciousness. Billions of dollars flowing out of Russia and the central bank being forced to intervene last week to prop up the rouble inevitably put traders in a cold sweat.