If you beat someone or something for long enough, submission will follow one way or another. One way might be a reluctant shrug and an “OK, you win” The other, anything from serious injury to a knock-out, terminal or otherwise. We and the economy have now had around two serious interest-rate batterings a month since last autumn and the danger is that this one could be a final blow for many. All for the greater good, I’m sure Messrs Bailey, Hunt and Sunak would argue; or, to paraphrase E. Scrooge, ‘perhaps they had better go bust, and thus reduce the surplus business and home-owning population’. As that is what will surely follow, and should, I am afraid, be on the conscience of that particular triumvirate. And as always, it will be the redundant and repossessed who will bear the brunt. Plus ça change.
“CBI forecasts no Bank of England rate cuts until at least 2026”
The ‘lag’, ‘trailing leg’ or ‘long wake’ of any economic measure means that its effects are often felt long after the problem it was supposed to solve has disappeared. 2010’s ‘balancing the books within the space of one parliament’ (that went well, didn’t it?), austerity to you and me, is one example.