The Bank of England’s 1.5 percentage point interest rate cut was a shock. It looked like a panic measure. The trouble is that such violent, surprise action causes people to draw in their horns in fear, and thus tends to counteract the desired effect.

But how sensible is it to encourage borrowing for personal consumption? Keynes, it is true, wanted people to spend in a downturn and loathed the idea of increasing savings at such a time. But he was not visualising a society that was already seriously over-indebted.