We are watching a bonfire of the old orthodoxies as well as of the vanities. This week Barack Obama promised to spend hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars to prop up the sinking US economy. Gordon Brown’s British government announced it would soak the rich to pay for an economic rescue package.

In between times, the Bush administration all but nationalised Citigroup, the world’s largest bank. For good measure it threw another, yes another, $800bn into the effort to thaw US credit markets. Everywhere you look, Keynes’s demand management is replacing Adam Smith’s invisible hand; printing money, a mortal sin under the fracturing Washington consensus, is the new prudence.