Central bankers face some very difficult choices

Six years ago this month the sub-prime crisis in the US finally erupted and unleashed the greatest shock that the global economic and financial system had seen since the 1930s.

Global policy makers are still struggling to come to terms with the impact, as evidenced by a prolonged period of zero interest rates in the US and interest rate levels in the eurozone that the inflation hawks in the ECB would never have deemed possible.

Central bankers have been forced to pursue and continue to pursue very unorthodox policies, such as bond buying and quantitative easing of money, and some governments have been trying to inject fiscal stimulus, while others have been trying to do the very opposite to arrest burgeoning public deficits.