The world has seldom been worse-equipped to fight a recession. Yet it has never had fewer recessions to fight. That makes the next global downturn difficult to imagine but it will most likely be a traumatic and unlooked-for event, more like the sudden outbreak of a new disease than the annual onset of flu.
Recession alarms sounded loudly this summer thanks to an inversion of the US yield curve, which means rates on shorter-term debt are higher than those on longer-term ones. That came as the current economic expansion broke records and we experienced a global slide in measures of manufacturing sentiment.
With interest rates trapped at zero or close to it across much of the industrialised world, central banks have little room to respond. Any slump in economic activity is a frightening prospect.