Poor Wim Duisenberg. Having spent weeks telling the markets there was nothing to worry about in the plummeting euro and asserting that the ECB did not want to follow its British counterpart in regular adjustments to interest rates, he and his colleagues ended up making precisely such an incremental change due to worries about the euro.

Quite how the market is supposed to trust the euro and its guardians in the face of such equivocation is difficult to see.

I know Mr Duisenberg insisted he and his colleagues had prepared the markets for the volte face in the days running up to the decision, but the comments that were made tended only to confuse rather than prepare. His insistence at a press conference after the rate rise that the move was not a panic attack came across as the hollow protestations of a man who had sought to turn back the tide and had failed.