By golly, we are a banal lot, aren’t we? How soon we forget the turmoil of yesteryear. Truly, if we aren’t just a bunch of hypocrites, then we are surely a bunch of sanguine ignoramuses.

‘No, that can’t be right,’ people reading this will probably say. They’ll also say that I’ve gone completely mad. They’ll say that in fact the global economic recovery that we seem to be ushering in now is the real deal, the real McCoy, the real Cinderella story of 21st century capitalism.