In case you didn't notice, no fewer than five central banks upped their interest rates yesterday.

Apart from our own Old Lady and the European Central Bank - gradually gaining in authority, if not affection - there was Denmark, which pegs its currency to the euro having voted not to join it, and Slovenia, due to join the thing next year.

You may say they don't count, because they go along with whatever the ECB does anyway.

But South Africa does. The economy there has been bubbling along so strongly that the rate is now eight per cent, after a half-point rise yesterday.

Australia counts, too, and the cost of borrowing there also went up earlier this week.

So while it is human to gaze at one's own navel on these occasions, it is worth noting a global trend in this aggressively global economy.

Next week it is the big one again.

The US Federal Reserve will decide whether to apply its eighteenth increase in a row to the world's biggest economy.

That is harder to predict - by some measures the American economy is easing off on its own, but equally it has got more inflation than the Fed would like.

Provided any US increase comes with a statement suggesting that enough is probably enough, our own increase yesterday should do not great harm.

But if the Fed decides it has to give the American economy - more particularly the American housing market - a short, sharp shock, our own nascent export boomlet will be among the casualties. So will the full-blown export boom in Asia.

With that caveat, it is possible to take yesterday's quarter-point too tragically. Mathematically, it isn't going to hurt any company that is not grossly over-borrowed and already heading for trouble.

Morale is something else, the more so at a time when industry has been failing to invest as it usually does as a recovery, however gradual, takes hold. If industrialists fear that this may be the start of a long series of increases, they will go on not investing.

There is no reason to suppose yesterday's move is anything of the sort. The Bank takes care to leave no hostages to fortune. But its long, careful statement yesterday looked like the work of a committee that hopes it has made a pre-emptive strike, possibly by a narrow majority.

Another intriguing piece of wording came from the CBI. The employers' organisation took all afternoon to come up with any response at all and then it started with the words "CBI member companies will be disappointed" - member companies, note, not the CBI.

The inwardness of this is that nobody can remember the CBI ever calling for higher interest rates. Its members are not like that. But its new director general is Richard Lambert - until a few months ago a member of the Bank's interest setting committee.

Instead of denouncing his former colleagues, he contented himself with the hope that a modest rise now will remove the risk of something worse later in the year.

We can all hope that, just odd that it took the CBI all afternoon to think of it.