Good grief. Every so often, one learns something shocking about markets and this morning I found out that wholesale tea is priced in dollars rather than sterling (or the Indian or Chinese currencies).

This means that the British tea drinker is going to suffer even more from the rising price of tea than Americans because of the fall in the value of the pound against the dollar.

Droughts in tea-producing countries are pushing up the wholesale price of tea leaves and, as this FT piece points out, currency weakness is compounding the problem for the UK, which is now the second-largest importer of tea, having been overtaken by Russia.

Russian tea aficionados are presumably drinking to the recent resurgence in the rouble against the dollar, as a result of a bounce in oil prices

It feels a bit unfair for tea to be priced in the US currency when this remains a coffee-drinking culture, on the whole. One can easily buy British tea here, but it is getting ever pricier.

It is enough to make one wish for a global reserve currency, as those tea-drinking Russians would prefer.

Update: Felix Salmon, who has moved from Conde Nast Portfolio to Reuters, points out that I am falling for the denomination fallacy. So does an acerbic commentator below.