A 10 per cent increase in oil prices translates to a 0.15 per cent loss of global GDP and a rise of 0.4 per cent in global inflation, says Gita Gopinath, deputy managing director of the IMF. Before Hamas launched its assault on Israel on 7 October, the Brent Crude barrel price had already moved 20 per cent above its summer level of $75 and pundits were predicting $100, based on prospects of tighter supply from Saudi Arabia and Russia.

Natural gas prices have also risen sharply with winter approaching – and no one knows how escalation of the latest Middle East conflict might affect other energy flows and supply chains. But it will clearly add a notch to inflation, forcing interest rates to stay higher for longer, denting investment confidence and increasing the likelihood of the recession which many UK economists sense is already in the air – a sense reinforced by recent flatlining of growth and cooling in the jobs market.

But with wage rises running at 7.8 per cent, ahead of inflation at 6.7 per cent, the Bank of England economist Huw Pill understated Britishly when he told an audience in Marrakech this week that ‘we still have some work to do’ and should not ‘declare victory prematurely’. Be wary of Rishi Sunak doing just that if inflation dips even temporarily to his target of 5.4 per cent, or half its 2022 peak, in December. Put simply, there may be worse to come.

Pick people not archetypes

The fall of former Barclays chief executive Jes Staley – banned for life from senior jobs in financial services and fined £1.8 million for ‘recklessly’ misleading regulators and the Barclays board about the nature of his friendship with the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein – raises the question of why Barclays recruited him in the first place. Part of the answer is that he came from a first career with JP Morgan, the blue-chip global corporate bank.

Just as it used to be said that ‘nobody ever got fired for buying IBM computers’, so it’s the case that for the past 40 years, many other banks have sought to emulate Morgan’s success (‘Doing first-class business in a first-class way,’ Pierpont Morgan Jr said in 1933) by the simple device of headhunting its well-trained and well-tailored people.

‘Elegance of conduct’ is what marks Morgan man, a New York business school professor once wrote. But not so, evidently, in the case of Staley, whose six-year tenure at Barclays was marred by other ructions besides the Epstein taint. And not so in the case of the hotshot Morgan banker (now long dead, so no need to name him) who was hired with great éclat for a top job at Barclays when I worked there in the 1980s – and of whom I later wrote that we wondered whether ‘his cardiologist had advised him to drink like a fish as a desperate measure to suppress his rampant libido’.

Readers will no doubt suggest other companies with brand power comparable to Morgan’s in the senior recruitment market. Goldman Sachs, nursery of half the world’s central bankers, is one, as is the management consultancy McKinsey, alma mater of successive CBI director-generals plus Lord (Stephen) Green of HSBC and Tidjane Thiam of Credit Suisse; easier to list the notable alumni, perhaps, than the clients who declare themselves delighted with McKinsey’s advice. But that’s another story: the lesson of this one is when picking people, beware of corporate archetypes.

A very British disease

Another name for that brand-power list is the Bank of England, whose former staffers range from the I’m a Celebrity contestant Matt Hancock to the shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, currently basking in her endorsement by former governor Mark Carney. And let’s not forget Sir Paul Tucker, the popular deputy governor who lost out to Carney and made a new life as a Harvard academic. In London this week lecturing on ‘Monetary system stability amid global discord’, Tucker slipped in a suggestion that central bankers everywhere would be better able to focus on their core role of defeating inflation, whatever discord afflicts the world, if their appointments were made by independent bodies rather than politicians. Some hope, you might say, but a point worth debating before the next governor is chosen by whoever’s in Downing Street in 2028.

Tucker also intrigued his audience with a reference to ‘Baumol’s disease’. Dreadful treatment by British Airways on his delayed transatlantic flight, he told us, following recent frustrations with his retail bank, had persuaded him that the UK services sector is suffering a bout of Baumol’s – which turns out to refer to rising wages in jobs that show no productivity improvement. A chronic British ailment, indeed, and a useful addition to this column’s vocabulary.

Wily old dog

You may have noticed – see recent items on Rupert Murdoch and the late Mohamed Al-Fayed – that I have a soft spot for buccaneers of the business world who carry on generating colourful copy in their sunset years. But I’m struggling to find anything positive to say about Bernie Ecclestone, the wily 92-year-old former Formula 1 chief who, despite pleading that the stress of a trial might finish him off, has collected a 17-month suspended sentence for fraud and agreed to pay £653 million in back taxes and fines to HMRC.

Having previously paid £60 million to end a bribery case against him in Germany, Ecclestone’s lifetime legal costs are likely to have far exceeded his giving to good causes. But last week’s penalty, converting a quarter of his fortune into unexpected public-sector revenue, offers opportunities to memorialise him. There’s enough in the pot to pay for a mid-sized Ecclestone Hospital for the NHS, plus a Type 31 frigate for the Royal Navy. The warship might even be named HMS Brulee, after Bernie’s vicious red chow that once terrorised his Chelsea neighbours.