But we were saying more than this – we were saying that, even though it was longer, it still had not shown any of the imbalances that characterised the latter stages of earlier expansions: ·  although inflation of goods and services prices had risen, it was not by enough to threaten our medium-term objective;  ·  asset price inflation of either shares or property had not become a problem;  ·  wages growth remained moderate;  ·  there had not been excessive physical investment with its attendant risk of over-capacity; and  ·  the current account deficit was not high by the standards of the past 20 years, and falling quickly.
For these reasons (and for others that I will come to later), we always felt optimistic about our medium-term economic prospects. This does not mean that we felt that the strong expansion of the 1990s could continue indefinitely at the average growth rate we were then recording.