For much of the decade following the 2008 financial crisis, some central bankers would predict, every quarter, that inflation would soon return. After they were invariably frustrated, they would predict, once again, that it would come back — this time slightly lower.

It is this humbling experience that informs reactions to present market worries about a return of price growth. Having seen predictions of a return to “normal” inflation come to nothing so many times — as well as misplaced warnings that quantitative easing would lead to hyperinflation — it is now much harder to believe that there will be a swift return to inflation after the pandemic, which provoked even deeper falls in economic activity.

History, however, is replete with “regime shifts” where the behaviour of economies durably changed. That includes the low growth and low inflation after the 2008 crisis or what former Bank of England governor Mervyn King called the “NICE period” before it — a decade of non-inflationary constant expansion. Many such shifts follow recessions, after which the certainties of the previous regime seem no longer to hold. Few have been predictable before the fact.