After the gloomy combination of soaring inflation, rising unemployment and a downbeat assessment from the Bank of England, there was nothing for it but to travel back in time to 1990.

The summer of 1990 marked the beginning of the last recession, a downturn that was to last until the spring of 1992, making it the longest, though not the deepest, in the post-war period.

What was the Bank saying 18 years ago, in the summer of 1990? Then, of course, it was a mere agent of the Treasury, and not the interest-rate-setting body it is today. But it had a view, and it expressed it in its August 1990 quarterly bulletin.

Then, as now, oil and other commodity prices had risen, pushing inflation sharply higher. There was talk of a credit crunch as the banks reined back lending.

But the Bank of 1990 was quite hardline and, as it turned out, quite wrong. So concerned was it about inflation and rising wages that it dismissed business worries about impending recession, saying that the gloomy surveys then being published “don’t add up to a strong risk of recession”.

We have all changed in 18 years. Before independence, it was almost the Bank’s statutory duty to warn on wages and try to keep politicians, who took the economic decisions, on the straight and narrow.

Now that it has to take some of those decisions itself, things are slightly different, not least because the Bank has to take part of the responsibility for what Mervyn King, the governor, described as the “difficult and painful adjustment” the economy is undergoing.

Only time will tell if its assessment now of a “broadly flat” economy over the next 12 months, followed by an upturn, is accurate or, as 18 years ago, too upbeat. Many of the surveys now are also warning of grimmer times ahead than a merely flat economy.

Nor will we know for some time whether the Bank is right to put its faith in inflation coming back down sharply after it has hit a peak of 5% or so later this year.

Let me take growth and inflation in turn, accepting, of course, that the two are related. I wrote at the beginning of July that after 64 quarters of economic growth, avoiding at least a quarter of declining gross domestic product (GDP) over the next year will be an enormous challenge.

How big a challenge is revealed by looking at what is happening elsewhere. America’s GDP, we now know, fell in the final quarter of last year, while both the eurozone and Japan experienced falling GDP in the second quarter of this year.

This was euroland’s first GDP fall since the single currency began in 1999 and included declines in Germany, France and Italy. If Britain succumbs, it will have done so later than most competitor economies, which makes it slightly hard to see why the markets are so downbeat about sterling at the moment.

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