Logically, you would expect it to be the other way around – that the now well-established economic recovery would give renewed momentum to the bull market. But this ignores the distortions of the soaraway tech sector.

Tech is widely seen as the big commercial winner from the pandemic; from movie streaming to social media, Zoom calls, home delivery and even Peloton exercise bikes, it is as if the sector was deliberately engineered to profit from the social distancing measures that were introduced.

Now that things are beginning to return to normal, it no longer seems like such a two-way bet.

Tech has also been a prime beneficiary of the ultra-easy monetary conditions used to support demand through the pandemic.

This has both provided abundant funding for almost any technology-driven venture, however hare-brained, and put a further rocket under already stretched tech valuations. That happy disposition is now under threat from rising interest rates.

As indeed is the economy as a whole. Having been caught asleep at the wheel over the speed and extent of the inflationary pickup, the US Federal Reserve and its peers elsewhere are faced with the prospect of having to apply a full-on handbrake turn to get on top of the problem.

That might tip the whole economy into recession, a prospect alluded to by the International Monetary Fund in its latest, heavily downgraded forecasts for the world economy over the next two years.

In seeking to counter the economic effects of lockdown, it seems, central bankers let the inflationary genie out of the bottle, and are now struggling to get it back in again. In any case, the once hoped for soft landing looks ever less likely.

Countries that spent the most countering the pandemic – the US, Canada and the UK – seem particularly vulnerable to the inflationary pressures, having created a wall of money that like a dam burst now comes flooding into an economy whose supply side has been badly impaired by pandemic: “intertemporal redistribution of consumption”, as it is known in the jargon.

Business expansions, it used to be said, don’t die of old age; they are murdered by the actions of the US Federal Reserve. The same might be said of bull markets.

Even without Putin’s duplicity, then, stock markets were likely to be in some trouble. The Russian leader is just the potentially lighted match at the end of the fuse.

When asked what the stock market would do, JP Morgan reportedly replied; “it will fluctuate”. That’s one bet at least that we can all safely make.