The Government, on the other hand, may put the best possible interpretation on the figures its bureaucrats produce, but it is stretching credibility to believe that any democratically elected government would willfully distort its forecast for its own political advantage; the price of being found out would be catastrophically high.

There is an extent to which all the forecasting and movements in the market coalesce into a kind of low level, crypto-gambling chatter. The state of the markets - or, rather, the indices aggregating a small number of the biggest companies - is announced hourly along with the weather and the traffic report; currency movements are reported in minute detail; and you can always find one forecaster who will say what sensationalism requires.

Left at that, the scenario would simply represent the thin bile of vacuous malice but although the number of people who own so many shares that market movements really matter is grossly exaggerated, there is a fundamental point which affects all of us. Why should we, when considering whether to buy that new refrigerator now or wait, when we wonder about taking that extra short holiday or keeping the money in a long-term savings plan, be forced to make our judgments on the basis of inaccurate, and sometimes deliberately inaccurate, forecasting?

The truth is that we in the United Kingdom have not yet learned to value the priceless independence recently bestowed by our Government on the Bank of England, our central bank. Many of us have gazed with speechless envy at the peerless American treasures of Paul Volker and Alan Greenspan and now that we have followed their example we have not yet learned to adjust to our new and more fortunate forecasting environment.

Help is at hand. Out of the crazed maze of the adolescent Internet there will surely arise a body of information provision which establishes itself as credible in order to attract repeat business. Newspapers with political agendas and commercial houses with trading agendas will lose credibility in the face of think tanks and research institutes anxious to improve their branding and their balance sheets with regular 'hits' from people anxious to be told the truth as far as brains can contrive to give it shape. This will not be the death of tabloid journalism and cheap politics but it will separate them at last from the serious business of rationally planning our lives. The financial fantasies of world collapse will sit nicely alongside doomsday scenarios of global Winter and global inferno, of rapist infested copses and killer pandemics.

The nice thing about spending money and voting are that they are actions which can be measured independently of what people say they will do; the opinion polls and the forecasts are as nothing to the ballot box and the consumer spending index.

One thing we need to learn in a mature democracy is the difference between partial opinionising and unattributable pronouncements on the one hand and solid evidence on the other. We are still far too wont to believe what we want to believe regardless of the facts. As long as the only consequence is that we are personally disadvantaged by this idiocy it can be put down as a penalty of self indulgence but such liberties should not be allowed to public figures and people in positions of trust and responsibility who damage us in pursuit of their selfish, political or economic ends. All that having been said, the fate of such charlatans is in our hands; if we go on voting for them, listening to them, buying their papers and watching their posturings we only have ourselves to blame.