On Wednesday the Bank of England revealed that one of its deputy governors had joined the long-standing interest-rate dove Prof David Blanchflower in voting for a rate cut earlier this month.
Look, we were told, opinion is shifting on the Bank's interest-setting committee.
One more heave and there will be a majority for a cut next month.
And how did the pound respond? It has been drifting steadily against both the dollar and the euro for a little while amid talk of British interest rates coming down early in the New Year - and thanks for minor mercies in the West Midlands.
Well, yesterday, instead of sinking further, sterling nudged higher against the greenback (though not against the euro, just as well for British exporters).
That may be for arcane reasons that only currency dealers can understand. Or it may be that some people are not unduly impressed by the shifting opinion theory.
They may have noticed that the deputy governor who changed his mind is Sir John Gieve - the one-time Home Office civil servant who doubles as a director of the Financial Services Authority in charge of, yes, banking supervision.
He is the one who confessed to the Commons Treasury select committee that he never got round to reading Northern Rock's half-time report, then stayed on holiday when the Geordie mortgage lender imploded.
Misfortunes overtake us all from time to time, but just now it seems far-fetched to build up Sir John as a key opinion-former on the Bank's committee or anywhere.
I have an uneasy sense that nothing much will happen to interest rates while oil is within a whisker of $100 a barrel and factory gate prices are charging away faster than at any time since
December, 1995 - or until the Bank sees convincing evidence of the economic slowdown it says we need.
Financial companies are having a rotten time, so are most of those involved in any kind of property and some, but not all, retailers.
The rest of the economy is still chug-ging along quite well, probably too well for the Bank's comfort.
A standstill in business investment in the three months to September reported yesterday may be a straw in the wind - or rather a breeze - off the bottom of the Beaufort scale.
----- Still, there is no arguing about the financial pain.
The latest symptom is at Abbey - no longer Britain's second biggest
mortgage lender now Nationwide has merged with Portman.
It has pulled what in half-ordinary times would be regarded as a routine fund-raising, known as a "covered" bond issue.
True, the security would have been a clutch of Abbey mortgages.
Nobody is too keen on mortgages as security at present, though there is no suggestion of anything remotely wrong with Abbey's.
But the "covered" bit is a guarantee from Abbey to pay up even if the value of the mortgages collapses.
Abbey, remember, is now the property of Banco Santander, one of the pillars of Spanish banking. Yet nobody wanted to know. And most continental mortgages are funded by covered bonds.
