This was Mervyn King's last stand. Having been pushed into a spectacular U-turn in June over the provision of liquidity to the UK banking system, the governor of the Bank of England, had hoped that his final act before retiring next year would be to force the major UK banks into another round of recapitalisation.

Along with some other UK policy makers, King has become convinced that the reason the UK economy hasn't recovered as quickly as he expected is that banks were insufficiently recapitalised in 2008/2009; only a fresh round of capital raising can prevent the UK economy turning Japanese as businesses are starved of credit. The BOE's Financial Stability Review news conference on Thursday was supposed to be the moment this historic wrong was put right. It didn't happen.