Not many central bankers get to be remembered as being truly great. You rarely see statues paying tribute to deft monetary policy. If the world rapidly manages to escape its current high-inflation, low-growth rut, the leaders of central banks in the UK, US and EU will certainly have earned some recognition. For now, that seems a distant prospect.

There are grounds for thinking central bankers were too slow to tighten over the past year: inflation has been climbing out of the comfort zone for months. But the scale of the current surge in inflation — which stands at 8.3 per cent in the US, 7.5 per cent in the eurozone and 7 per cent in the UK (with an expectation it will hit 10 per cent by year-end) —  is largely unrelated to those judgments. Monetary authorities, who think in months and years, have been hit by rapid-fire shocks from supply-chain blockages, China’s zero-Covid policy and Ukraine.

Their challenge now is to bring inflation back into normal bounds in the medium term and to avoid drifting into a cycle where expectations lead to persistently higher inflation rates. It would be easier to tackle this sort of problem, and the higher policy interest rates it demands, amid robust growth. But we are where we are. This is the sort of moment for which independent central banks are built: they must be willing to tighten even as their economies dip.