by Jeremy Warner
Telegraph.co.uk
In Lewis Caroll’s Through the Looking Glass, the White Queen observes that sometimes she’s believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
Many things previously thought impossible have already happened since the start of the financial crisis nearly ten years ago. Who would have imagined that the US banking system would end up supported wholesale with public money, or that three of Britain’s major banks would be part nationalised, and others closed down entirely?
Did anyone even remotely predict a world of negative interest rates, in which investors gladly pay for the privilege of lending to sovereign governments, or that some European nations would actually go bust in all but name and would have to be bailed out by reluctant neighbours?