It is a fiscal agent, like the Banca d’Italia in the 1970s. Its de facto mandate is to keep insolvent Club Med states afloat and to mask the full extent of France’s deteriorating public debt profile. This ensures a dovish bias.

Yet both the ECB and Fed worship at the altar of ‘inflation expectations’, and therefore think they must breathe fire if there is any sign that these expectations are becoming “unhinged”, another favourite term in their lexicon.

The prevailing view as inflation spirals to 40-year highs in the US and Europe is that they must pick between poisons: either they let inflation become embedded in social psychology, and risk a self-feeding dynamic; or they take drastic action before the matters get out of hand.

No matter that the Fed itself published a dissident paper last September ripping apart the soft science of inflation expectations, adding for good measure that much of mainstream economics is “replete with ideas that ‘everyone knows’ to be true, but that are actually arrant nonsense”. Well, indeed.

The problem with this New Keynesian doctrinal architecture is that it ignores the role of money in the economy altogether, which is an odd thing to do for institutions that manage money.  

The Fed is today embarking on a course that will deliberately induce quasi-recessionary conditions, or a “softish landing” in the euphemistic utterance of chairman Jay Powell.

He even has the backing of Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, high priest of ultra-stimulus, the guru who told us for two years that there was no risk of inflation. 

“Prudence demands that we try to rein in prices now… it pains me to say that we can’t safely let the economy keep running this hot,” he says. You could knock me over with a feather.

The Fed has dusted down the episodes of 1965, 1984, and even 1994 as models of successful mid-cycle tightening, and is poised to go all in, guns blazing.

Let us hope that we are indeed at mid-cycle and not already in an enveloping recession. But even if the Fed is right, just remember that the Great Bond Massacre of 1994 set off the Mexican Tequila crisis and left a trail of havoc across the world.

Tin helmets are advised.