Amid fiscal shock and awe, more austerity is the last thing we need

A collapse in credibility under the former Tory PM is being followed by a return to sado-monetarism' under the new one

One of the unfortunate consequences of the 44-day Truss/Kwarteng economic experiment is that there is now almost certainly going to be an overreaction. It was fit and just that the free-marketeers were brought down by the markets they believed in. The irony of it! But the danger now, with all this talk about the black hole in the nation's finances, is that in its efforts to restore credibility" the Sunak/Hunt economic experiment could well be taking risks with the country's social fabric, while not necessarily retaining credibility in the markets.

To put it bluntly: when the central banks of the Group of Seven are on the warpath, deliberately fomenting recessionary forces to fight inflation, there is a danger of a recurrence of what, in the early 1980s, I termed sado-monetarism" - as if the sado-Brexiters were not enough.