The Treasury takes the opposite view. Despite the evidence, it thinks total spending is about right to buy all the goods and services that the economy could produce at full employment. It sees inflation as evidence of overheating because of “wage stickiness” and rising import costs. This reasoning has become increasingly difficult to sustain. In August the Bank of England broke ranks to say that the lack of jobs was partly down to a “weakness in underlying demand”. Britain’s household saving rate – around 11% – is the highest, bar the pandemic, since the early 2010s, signalling not exuberance but caution. Consumer confidence is falling.