Remember the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where two men push a wheelbarrow through a plague-afflicted village shouting: “Bring out your dead”? A family heaves a body on to the pile, whereupon it lifts his head and says: “But I’m not dead yet!” One man whacks him with a cudgel and says: “Now you are.” That is the perfect metaphor for the American consumer on the one hand and strategists, commentators and economists on the other. They keep trying to bury the consumer under a mountain of debt, even though he is alive and kicking.

There is an understandable cultural prejudice against debt. For most of history, the risks outweighed the costs. If you calculated wrongly, you did not just go bankrupt: you lost your business, home and possessions. That is why Benjamin Franklin, as “Poor Richard”, cautioned against debt. But times have changed. Low interest rates, securitisation and bankruptcy law have changed the nature of debt.