Many years ago we had a family friend of Lithuanian Jewish descent who had picked up a smattering of idiomatic English expressions. One of these was “buck up”.

Looking at much of the comment on the credit crunch, I feel like saying that myself. Surely we know by now that market economies do not move in a straight line but are subject to periodic setbacks of varying strength. The late Christopher Dow in his mammoth study, Major Recessions, defined these as occasions when gross domestic product showed a clear absolute fall between one year and the next. The UK has experienced five of these since 1920: 1920-21, 1929-32, 1973-75, 1979-82 and 1989-93. Output fell in these by a cumulative 10 per cent relative to trend. Allowing for the subsequent recovery periods, the net effect was to reduce trend growth from 3 to 2 per cent a year. Not a pretty story, yet hardly enough to justify many wishful-thinking commentators claiming each time that the final crisis of capitalism is at last upon us. What is more irritating is the way members of the financial elite also like to bathe in pessimism and say to each other: “The crisis is worse than you think” and then speculate on which will be the next enterprise to succumb. Other misleading clichés uttered at such times are “the old rules no longer apply” and “traditional remedies no longer work”.