Helicopter QE will never be reversed - Evans-Pritchard

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Lord Turner went on to argue that central banks in the US, Japan and Europe should stand ready to finance current spending as well, if push comes to shove. At least the money would go straight into the veins of the economy, rather than leaking out into asset bubbles.

Today's QE relies on pushing down borrowing costs. It is "creditism". That is a very blunt tool in a deleveraging bust when nobody wants to borrow.

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Stephen Jen from SLJ Macro Partners says Western analysts have been strangely slow to understand the breathtaking scale of what is under way. The Bank of Japan is already committed to bond purchases of $140bn a month in 2014. This is almost double the US Federal Reserve's net purchases (around $75bn a month), and five times as much as a share of GDP.

Prof Woodford and Lord Turner both think the Fed has already begun to monetise America's deficits, though Ben Bernanke has been studiously vague whenever pressed in testimony on Capitol Hill. These are early days. It is tentative and deniable.

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The bull case rests on US recovery, a seductive story as the housing market comes back to life and the shale boom revives the US chemical industry.

Yet the US money supply figures are no longer flashing buy signals. The M2 money stock has contracted over the past three months, and M2 velocity has dropped to the lowest ever recorded at 1.54.