Going down. The European Central Bank has cut interest rates to 2.5 per cent; the Bank of England to 2 per cent. US rates are 1 per cent; Japan’s 0.3 per cent. Beyond that lies the basement. Yet after zero rates – then what? Quantitative easing, perhaps, as used by Japan from 2001 to treat its own deflationary malaise.

Strip out the jargon and QE is a relatively simple concept: a switch from focusing on the price of money in an economy, that is to say interest rates, to its quantity. Technically, this is accomplished by the central bank’s issuing base money (“the printing press”) to purchase securities – anything from government bonds to corporate debt, even equities. Unlike interest rates, which cannot go below zero, QE is, in theory, limitless.