The world’s central bankers gathered at Jackson Hole last week in the great annual gathering of the monetary policy clan. Yet while tribal loyalty among central banks is eternal, the varied performance of the big economies is taking them in different directions.

Having moved more or less concertedly towards easing during the global financial crisis, central banks are on the point of dispersing. Their divergent paths partly reflect how much they themselves have achieved over the past six years and partly how much support governments have given to their various economies’ recoveries.

Financial markets were watching Friday’s Jackson Hole speech by Janet Yellen, chairwoman of the US Fed, for signals about when, not whether, economic growth in the US would cause the central bank to start raising interest rates. (Answer: not clear.) Meanwhile Mario Draghi, her counterpart at the European Central Bank, had to promise anxious investors that the ECB would ease more if necessary.