The next financial crisis is coming ‘with a vengeance’, says the expert. But when?

There’s a passage in Philip Larkin’s All What Jazz, the collection of his writings as the Daily Telegraph’s jazz critic, that imagines his typical readers. Husbands of ‘ageing and bitter wives they first seduced to Artie Shaw’s “Begin the Beguine”’ who take comfort from collections of ‘scratched coverless 78s in the attic’, they are ‘men whose first coronary is coming like Christmas’. The same sense of gloomy inevitability often pervades the so-called ‘dismal science’ of economic commentary, amplified by political uncertainty and traumatic events: the one thing we know for certain is that economic life is cyclical and that any run of benign signals can only ever be temporary. It’s only a matter of when and in what form the next downturn comes upon us, and of taking what steps we can to soften its impact. This week Claudio Borio of the Bank for International Settlements — the central bank of central banks — encapsulated this foreboding with a phrase almost as resonant as Larkin’s.