‘Iatrogenic,” Didier Saint-Georges, managing director at the French asset manager Carmignac, said after a rummage through his memory bank. We had been talking about the easy money policies of central banks over the past decade and the elusive word neatly summed up his opinion.

Iatrogenic is the medical term for a treatment that cures a patient of one illness but induces another. Chemotherapy causes anaemia but tackles cancer, for example. For Mr Saint-Georges, cheap money, in quantitative easing and ultra-low interest rates, was the life-saving medicine needed after the financial crisis, but populism has turned out to be its dangerous side-effect.

In medicine, there are two forms of iatrogenesis. There are the side-effects you know, as with chemotherapy, and there are the side-effects you don’t.