And the rate of unemployment fell from a peak of over 10½% on the LFS measure to around 5% last summer; on the claimant count measure it fell from some 10% to just over 3%, which meant that the number of people claiming unemployment benefit, at under 950,000, was the lowest for 26 years. Short-term interest rates are at a 38-year low. All of that it seems to me gives the lie to a view that was quite widespread a decade ago, that sustained low inflation would inevitably mean continuous suppression of the real economy. I'd go further myself and suggest that it provides considerable positive support for the central bankers' credo. Now some of you - given what's been happening to your own businesses, to certain particular business sectors, and in regions of the country where those sectors are particularly heavily concentrated - may think that I've been living on a different planet. The problem is - and it is a real problem - that with the best will in the world macro-economic stability, the stability of the economy as a whole, cannot guarantee stability at the more micro-economic level: it can not guarantee the prosperity of every individual business or even of whole business sectors or geographic regions.
But whatever the explanation the resulting strength of sterling against the euro has contributed to the pressure on the internationally - exposed sectors of our economy, and a stronger euro would, from my perspective, help us towards better balanced growth in this country. It would also incidentally facilitate debate about sterling's possible entry into the single currency, in the sense that the undoubted attraction of nominal exchange rate certainty vis à vis our European trading partners, which is a major potential advantage of our adopting the euro, must depend to some degree on the likely exchange rate at which we might join. These then are the monetary challenges that we have faced over the recent period. The question now, of course, is where do we go from here? There has recently been encouraging evidence - in the US data particularly but also for example in many of the more forward-looking indicators of European economic activity - that we are now in the early stages of global recovery. We cannot be sure that the early momentum will be maintained; nor do we know just how strong the expansion will prove to be or how long it will last; but the signs are promising, and indeed far more positive than any of us would have dared to hope just six months or so ago in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.