The retail industry is having a bumper time of things right now, with spending on the high street, in stores and malls, and on line up by around 7% since a year ago. That's the fastest rate of growth for ten years.
A decade ago, Tony Blair was Prime minister, the EU enlarged to include ten new states, and Arsenal won the Premier League at a canter without being beaten. And the Bank of England - concerned over the strength of consumer spending and inflationary pressures - raised official interest rates. By August of that year they had reached 4.75%.
This time round I wouldn't expect anything quite so dramatic. Read the minutes of the recent Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting held earlier this month, and it's clear that some MPC members think the decision over the state of the economy's recovery and the need for an early interest rate hike is becoming 'more balanced'.
But the Bank has been keen to stress, through its 'forward guidance', that rates won't rise soon and even when they do, they won't go up too much. That's a message to firms and households to go out and invest and spend to keep growth going.
Official interest rates were cut to 0.5% back in 2009 when there were real fears of a 1930s style depression. Rates have remained there ever since. The Bank has also pumped in £375bn of Quantitative Easing (QE).
And with rising concern over a possible 'triple dip' in late 2012, the Bank threw the kitchen sink at getting the economy moving. The Funding for Lending (F4L) scheme was introduced in late 2012, with the intention of getting banks to lend to businesses that were feeling starved of credit. But in practice it soon became about trying to kick start a stagnant mortgage market.
More recently the government has brought in the Help to Buy scheme to boost the housing market further. This has had the desired effect, although with the UK still building far fewer than the 240,000 houses a year that it needs, the end effect will probably be another house price bubble unless things are cooled at some point soon. Meanwhile, the Bank is willing to let the recovery run until spare capacity is used up, talking of 'customised' measures to try to cool the housing market.
One argument is that with all the monetary stimuli thrown at the economy of late then the economy is on something of a "high", and we are witnessing another consumption-led binge that will end badly. Here we go again?
However, the economy is in fact in a much better position than five or even two years ago. The fact that retail spending is up so much is in main part because consumers are more confident and less concerned that they will lose their jobs than when the economy was in recession or flatlining.
And in the first three months of this year, there was an 8.7% year-on-year rise in business investment, indicating rising business confidence. The recovery is at last looking better balanced, with business investment, services, manufacturing and construction all growing.
That's the good news. But one of the risks for the real economy is that hopes for further export growth are being eroded by a sustained rise in the value of sterling. Despite the Bank's forward guidance, financial markets have brought forward the date at which they think the Bank of England will announce an interest rate rise to February next year; that's before they expect any move from the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank or the Bank of Japan.
The irony is that having talked the talk on rebalancing, the government has resorted to its old trick of stimulating the housing market through 'Help to Buy' to get confidence moving, and with it consumer borrowing and spending.
Even if interest rates don't actually rise that soon, the markets appear to think that they will need to and so sterling has been appreciating. That doesn't help our exporters. The very real danger is that the UK's competitiveness boost from the 2008-9 sterling devaluation and hence any further rebalancing through export-led growth could be effectively snuffed out by sterling's appreciation.
* Professor David Bailey works at the Aston Business School
