It is the policy that dare not speak its name: the printing press. The time has come to employ this nuclear option on a grand scale. The alternative is likely to be a lost decade. The waste is more than unnecessary; it is cruel. Sadists seem to revel in that cruelty. Sane people should reject it. It is wrong, intellectually and morally.

A recession looms close in the UK and other high-income countries, less than four years after the start of the last one. This would be a disaster for those who would lose their jobs or the young, who would find their hopes of work further postponed.

A big danger for the UK is a sharp fall in house prices, which would threaten the finances of households and banks. A new recession would also shatter fragile business confidence, which would reduce real business investment, still 20 per cent lower in early 2011 than before the crisis. That would further delay the structural shifts on which sustained recovery depend. With UK gross domestic product still 4 per cent below its pre-crisis peak, this depression would be longer and costlier, in terms of lost output, than the Great Depression of the 1930s, as I noted four weeks ago.