Europe faces a threat of deflation, which it seems unlikely to be willing to fight.

It is hard to imagine, much less find, a better exemplar of how capital gets mis-allocated in a bubble than British property agent Foxtons, whose stock was publicly listed this month.

The worry about the Bank of England’s new policy of forward guidance is not so much that the market doesn’t appear to believe it, though that can’t help, as the extent to which the whole plan depends on house price gains.