Sometimes the person in the street is wiser than the policy intellectual. After decades worrying about too much inflation some of the would-be intellectual policy commentators are now worrying about too little. But the UK consumer is hardly likely to complain that the consumer price index is “only” 2.2 per cent higher than a year ago and has hardly ever been as low as the official target of 2 per cent.

The latest scare arises because the inflation rate in the eurozone has fallen to a year-on-year 0.7 per cent or an “underlying” 0.8 per cent. The surprise cut in the European Central Bank official short-term interest rate was entirely justified – indeed belated – as an attempt to boost real output in the euro area, which has been falling or stagnant for more than two years. Any upward impact on the euro inflation rate will be a cost and not a benefit.

There are also ample grounds for the US Federal Reserve to continue its “quantitative easing” if it believes that there is still a lot of slack in the US economy, but not because an inflation rate hovering between 1.5 per cent and 2 per cent is, in any sense, too low.