The Federal Reserve this week quietly ended its third bout of quantitative easing, an experiment that contrived to attract warnings of doom both for being withdrawn and for starting in the first place.

The Fed’s radical monetary easing – and similar measures by the Bank of England – have yet to be universally accepted. In Tokyo, the Bank of Japan on Friday announced that, despite internal opposition, it would ramp up its own QE programme. But in the eurozone, where it emerged this week that inflation has been below target for 21 months, the laggardly European Central Bank has yet to follow.

While constructing precise counterfactuals is impossible, it is overwhelmingly likely that the Fed and BoE were right and sceptics at the ECB and the BoJ are wrong. QE was exactly the right thing to try in reviving the US economy: indeed, a school of critics plausibly suggests it should have been faster and that it is premature to withdraw it now. Unemployment rates in the US are now lower than when the global financial crisis hit at the end of 2008: that of the eurozone is more than 3 percentage points higher.