Until the last day or two, Wall Street was producing lots of cheerful charts with the lines pointing happily skywards. The stock market is up, and the high yield debt market, where poorly rated companies raise money, is “on fire”, according to the analysts at Citigroup.

The Federal Reserve, along with other central banks, seems to have successfully flooded the markets with cheap capital, buoying most asset markets in the process. “The Fed is the Great Enabler,” says one senior Treasury official.