But all that notwithstanding, both the Bank and the government must directly share at least some responsibility for our current predicament. Contributing to our all being “poorer now” is 15 years of ultra-loose central bank monetary policy with easy access to cheap or free credit (indeed, in the eurozone with negative deposit rates and bond yields, governments being paid to borrow money, accumulating punishingly high levels of debt when interest rates rise) contributing to the zombie economy. An existing problem was only added to by the exogenous shocks of a pandemic and a war.

The virtual extinction of Darwinian monetarist economics in which markets set the cost of capital rather than the central bank manipulating it through QE is a prime factor. Badly run companies should be allowed to go bust. Their labour and capital can be recycled into better run operations. It maintains a healthy, match-fit, competitive economy, essential to expanding national economic growth and wealth. In today’s investment world, exacerbated in the aftermath of the pandemic by the societal shift towards stakeholders’ interests over shareholders’ (the shareholder is merely one stakeholder and rapidly dropping down the pecking order), the ability of poorly run businesses to refinance without any great incentive to improve their practices leads to the build-up of surplus capacity, including labour and capital. It increases inefficiency and frictional costs; it drives down real wages; it undermines productivity and it creates an enduring and corrosive fiscal drag on the overall economy.

Governments suffer the same self-inflicted problems. Ours are a microcosm of a broader geographical malaise. As seen through increasing levels of state intervention, governments see themselves as better capital allocators than markets. Using accountants’ language, if the private sector is a ‘profit centre’, public services are seen as a ‘cost centre’. There is still an obligation placed on governments to demonstrate value for money for the taxpayer, but the emphasis is on less precise cost/benefit analysis rather than the private sector imperative of profits and returns on investment. It is all too easy for governments to fall into the trap of thinking that more money will improve services, and to borrow it on the never-never (or when borrowing is constrained, to raise the revenue by taxation), when often what is needed is fundamental operational reform. Spending money is easy; root-and-branch reform is exceedingly difficult, too often relying on that tiny minority of the politically safe or brave to implement it and see it through. But without that discipline, public spending runs away while the services it supports seldom improve. That too is enduringly corrosive. The whole economy suffers: sub-par growth rates (what the International Monetary Fund accurately describes as “feeble”) become the norm; the tax burden increases; competitiveness against international peers risks declining.