Mexican traders debate buying Twitter and shutting it down to silence Donald Trump

President-elect has hurt the nation's currency with a series of damaging tweets - now some people have an interesting proposal

Mr Trump has damaged several company's stock market valuations with his tweets, but Mexico has perhaps taken the worst hit (Getty)

There’s a strange idea circulating among Mexican currency traders. Well, more of a joke really. But there’s a certain logic to it.

It goes like this: Instead of spending its precious reserves of US dollars to prop up the peso, Mexico should just buy Twitter at a cost of about $12bn (£9.8bn) -- and immediately shut it down.

The notion made the rounds this week after the central bank revealed it had already blown through $2bn of reserves in a largely futile effort to prop up the peso which has been devalued by a steady stream of anti-Mexico Tweets from Donald Trump.

The President-elect has made a series of comments hinting he would put up trade barriers that could harm the Mexico’s economy.

“I would suggest they do it fast,” joked Juan Carlos Alderete, a foreign-exchange strategist at Banorte-Ixe in Mexico City. “Because we can barely afford it now."

Now, no one thinks this is really going to happen. And it’s hard to imagine it’d be effective anyway. But that the idea was even raised in jest shows how just how frustrated Mexicans are that their economy and the value of their savings are at the mercy of the seemingly random musings coming in 140-character bursts from Trump’s Twitter account.

Bloomberg