When the new cap is unveiled next week, confirming an increase in average annual utility bills from £1,277 to around £2,000, expect pretty lurid “heating versus eating” headlines.

As this cost-of-living crisis escalates, financial markets look precarious. The US-based Nasdaq tech-stock index is almost 20pc down since November, “bear market” territory, with “stay at home” companies that did well during lockdown – the online retailers and movie streamers – enduring the worst of it.

London’s FTSE-250 is 10pc down this year, despite our stellar vaccine programme and entrenched natural immunity. We’re meant to be in the midst of a V-shaped bounce back, with Covid restrictions are all but lifted, yet UK stocks are also shaky.

Some blame global financial jitters on tensions between Russia and Ukraine – and the increasingly bad-tempered East-West stand-off. The prospect of tougher sanctions on Europe’s pivotal energy supplier, plus turmoil across a region exporting swathes of wheat and other staples, with food prices are already elevated, is focusing minds. Yet the reasons for this market correction – if this is the start of a proper downturn – go much deeper. Shares have long been overvalued, pumped up by central bank money-printing.

Now serious inflation – by no means “transitory” – is forcing those same central banks to rein in the money printing and raise interest rates, removing the punchbowl that has fuelled this decade-long stock market party. And if this forced stimulus withdrawal does spark a proper financial rout, then all bets are off. Politics everywhere will be upended.

Even if the stock-bond bubble can be deflated slowly, economic issues are moving centre-stage, not least in the UK. Calls for the Government to scrap, or at least shelve, the incoming rise in employer and employee NICs are now coming from increasing credible quarters.

Reversing these April tax rises would be “absolutely possible” and “makes a lot of sense”, said Prof Jagjit Chadha, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, last week. “Higher NICs are essentially an attack on jobs, particularly for the lower paid – those hit most by this Covid crisis”.

Paul Johnson, director of the equally influential Institute for Fiscal Studies, said Chancellor Rishi Sunak has enough “fiscal room” to postpone this NIC rise.

New figures show the UK borrowed £16.8bn in December, less than the £18.5bn forecast. Tax revenues were £68.5bn last month, well above the official £64.5bn prediction. Corporation tax revenues meanwhile hit £5.5bn – a monthly record.