The Nice – non-inflationary, consistently expansionary – decade has gone. The next decade is going to be nasty. It is time to start learning lessons. “Niceness” proved a mistake.

The UK economy has moved with brutal speed from what Andrew Haldane, the Bank of England’s new executive director for financial stability, in a brilliant paper*, calls “the golden decade” of steady growth and low volatility to its opposite. Stability has proved the economy’s nemesis, as Hyman Minsky predicted.