Before the broader market rally began to sputter, there was the UK retail rally. The FTSE All-Share Retailers index is still up 61 per cent from its November low, as investors have jostled to catch the retail recovery. Yet expecting consumer spending to bounce back as from prior recessions could be a mistake.

Spending growth in the naughty noughties was supercharged by extraordinary borrowing. Look at the ratio of household debt to disposable income. Through the 1990s, this hovered around 100 per cent. But by December 2007 it had zoomed to 169 per cent. Even after slipping to 164 by September, it remains far ahead of the US’s 130 per cent. As never before, Britons treated homes as cash machines. From 1998 to 2008, they withdrew £326bn of equity from housing through remortgaging. The household savings ratio dropped close to zero.