So what kind of year was it? A good one for the global economy, with increasingly broad-based growth and a sense that the deadly grip of the financial crisis was starting to ease. For Britain, it was 12 months dominated by Brexit, as was always inevitable. We have not seen the last of these years.

A year ago, my annual forecasting league table, a staple of the economic calendar, caused controversy because it showed that forecasters had had a good 12 months in terms of predicting the economic numbers, even though most of them did not anticipate the biggest development in 2016 — the vote to leave the European Union.

This time there was no such problem. Forecasters knew what was coming in 2017 and