Shock therapy was the term used to describe the drastic switch from a planned publicly owned economy in the Soviet Union in 1990 to a full-blown capitalist mode of production. It was a disaster for living standards for a decade. Shock doctrine was the term used by Naomi Klein to describe the destruction of public services and the welfare state by governments from the 1980s. Now the major central banks are applying their own ‘shock therapy’ to the world economy, intent on driving up interest rates in order to control inflation, despite the growing evidence that this will lead to a global recession next year.