“A successful central bank should be boring”, a former Bank of England governor said more than 20 years ago. If any proof was needed that we are now in a radically different monetary era, one was given this week when the monetary policymakers of the world’s two largest economies arguably did their job by being as far from boring as could be imagined.

Within hours of each other on Wednesday, the European Central Bank held an emergency meeting and the US Federal Reserve enacted its largest interest rate rise in nearly 30 years. Both were dramatic moves — but while one drama was a reaction to markets, the other was in defiance of them.

Take the ECB first. It is never ideal for a central bank to hold an emergency meeting. But the euro’s central bank seems to have been able to use its “ad hoc” meeting Wednesday morning to get back on the front foot after being caught out by market reactions to its monetary policy meeting the week before.