Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank: having put off the decision for months, the bank now has no option other than to increase interest rates. Picture: NurPhoto
I’m old enough to remember the launch of the now infamous ad campaign which was designed to improve financial literacy, and which began in 2007, just before the economy went wallop. The line “I don’t know what a tracker mortgage is” has become emblematic of all that was wrong in the Celtic Tiger, where unsuspecting people were loaded with debt by unscrupulous banks.