Before the American election, the Brookings Institution predicted that a Trump victory would wipe 10-15% off the value of the S & P 500 share index. This turned out to be wrong: in fact, share prices rose strongly, reversing an initial 5% crash to finish the day at an all-time high. And note that, unlike the FTSE rise after Brexit, this is not being driven by a collapsing currency.

What’s going on here? I, like Brookings and most other people, did not expect this. In fact I expected economic apocalypse if Trump won – akin at the very least to the Brexit crash, if not on a par with the dot.com bubble crash. Trump made economic and labour protectionism the central theme of his campaign, both of which we would normally expect to hurt the economy and hence the price of company shares.

In the last few weeks a number of politicians and right-wing commentators have attacked Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, either for his conduct during the referendum campaign or for the policies he has overseen while at the Bank. 

These attacks are misguided. There is an important debate to be had about the nature of central bank policy in Britain and elsewhere – indeed, a debate about the very existence of central banks – but, with some notable exceptions, few of Carney’s critics seem to be aware of it.