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Herbert Hoover is attributed as saying, “Blessed are the young, for they will inherit the national debt”, which may be seen less as a joke and more as a prophecy as time goes on. When I studied Keynesianism at school, the great man was regarded as such, but also rather as the equivalent of the dotty old uncle with opinions on human rights taken from medieval warfare – the ‘best guess’ at the time but certainly way out of date now, not to mention distasteful.

I am not aware that he ever used the term ‘Quantative Easing’ which has seemed to creep into our vocabulary – we used to call it 'printing money' and even teenagers twenty five years ago would find the idea criminally insane and similar to the medieval practice of re-minting supposedly all-silver coins adulterated with base metals. It was considered a fantastic way of devaluing a currency on the international markets, in other words making the exercise completely pointless because it made the currency unit worth less.

It seems to reinforce the bizarreness of that other idea that a solution to the pensions crisis is to have more children, so there are more people to pay tax to government to pay pensions. The more observant may enquire when that particular spiral would stop, or rather what individual space allocation were permitted per person before that particular bill would be due for payment in the real world.

There are a quantity of views on rebalancing the books, including this, which makes you wonder why the discussions at national and international level are not focussing more on these fundamentals of fiscal housekeeping to get us back on track - it is not time to get real?