The trouble with success, however, is that it breeds arrogance. That may have been the trap Osborne fell into with tax credits, and he’s now in danger of doing the same with the economy. One after another, economists are lining up to warn that fiscal tools may yet have to be deployed to address the subdued state of demand and investment in the world economy, the latest being Ben Bernanke, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve. In an interview with the BBC, he implicitly rejected the “fiscal conservatism/monetary radicalism” policy mix of the Tory leadership as misguided, insisting that austerity had loaded too much of the stimulus burden onto financially destabilising central bank money printing