The central bankers’ obsession with interest rate cuts as a means of stimulating economic recovery reminds me of the dare games we played as children, such as ‘how long can you keep your finger in the candle flame?’ Or, in banking terms, ‘how close to zero can you fix interest rates before unleashing a retributive counter-force, the impact of which is unknowable because it has never been experienced?’

Or, discovering the law of diminishing returns in action, ‘identifying the point at which the level of benefit or profit gained is exceeded by the amount of money invested’.

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