When Mervyn (now Lord) King, during the early days of his 2003-2013 period as governor of the Bank of England, spoke of the NICE decade – Non-Inflationary, Consistently Expansionary economic growth – he would occasionally add a rider suggesting things might be too good to last. This was just an academic’s natural caution. If there was one thing that neither King nor the vast majority of central bankers and other policy-makers expected to hit the headlines in 2007-2008 it was the biggest financial crisis since the late 1920s and early 1930s, which, allied with woefully mistaken economic policies, caused the Great Depression.