The Bank of England has got its swagger back. After watching helpless as the economy dived into recession a year ago, Paul Fisher, the head of markets, insists the Bank’s extraordinary cuts in interest rates and its injection of money into the economy through its quantitative easing programme are now working. The Bank is back in charge.

“Personally I feel much more confident now that the asset purchase programme is having the scale and speed of impact that we would have hoped for when we started [in March]”, he says.