For the first time in many years, central banks' mettle is about to be tested. This will happen most obviously in the US and UK but also in the eurozone.
First it was the stockmarket and now it is household spending: financial and economic trends are defiantly failing to develop as predicted.
Given the nature of the financial crisis and the depth of the accompanying recession, the recovery process was always going to be a hard grind.
The Bank of England's latest thoughts on introducing negative interest rates to encourage higher lending from banks are 'somewhat schizophrenic', a leading economist has said.