Here is one measure of the extraordinary period of monetary policy we live in: Thursday’s announcements by the European Central Bank mean Mario Draghi is now certain to complete his eight years as the bank’s president without ever having raised interest rates.

He started his tenure by reversing the rises put in by his predecessor Jean-Claude Trichet. He will end it in November with rates remaining at their current record lows, which the ECB now promises to keep in place until the end of 2019 at the earliest.

That is not the only dovish shift in Frankfurt. The ECB also reconfirmed it would keep constant the amount of financial securities it had acquired as part of its quantitative easing programme until well after interest rates begin to rise — which, given the interest rate announcement, amounts to a delay for when “quantitative tightening” will finally start.