Those old enough to remember the early Laurel and Hardy talkies released in the 1930s (and frequently replayed on television here until that went from black-and-white to colour) will be familiar with that quote which turned up in most of the duo’s movies, the one where the always exasperated Oliver Hardy chided the hapless Stan Laurel with the words: "Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into." (Thanks to Professor Google, it seems the words were used in 15 of their films.)

Thanks, Ben Bernanke and your fellow central bankers.

Seeing I am labouring allusions, perhaps we should haul in the 1797 Goethe poem The Sorcerers’s Apprentice – the one where the untrained apprentice ends up with a broom refusing to stop hauling water from the well.

For that, again with thanks Ben.

Well, I think the central banks have just dumped us well and truly in it, and yet they can’t stop the money printing without derailing the global economy.

After all, Japan tried turning off the presses a decade ago with a deflationary consequence.

The latest blow that has winded the global economy is the new International Monetary Fund (IMF) report that essentially is aimed at hosing down any optimism still out there (you have to read past the "it's not really too bad" placebos in the text of the report).

Clearly, the metal markets got the message. Copper is now within a whisker of dropping below $US7000/tonne, lead likewise with the $2000/t barrier, and tin at $20,500/t and zinc at $1874/t will have a few mining executives breaking out in cold sweats. (We can only imagine the wall of worry being climbed by the higher cost gold producers.)

I’ll come back to the macro picture, but let’s have a look at page 37 of the IMF report, a breakout box about what China’s lending boom did to corporate leverage.

The stock of loans by the end of 2012 was 130% of GDP. If you add in trust loans, corporate bonds and some other sources of debt finance, the figure is actually 172%. Some companies have leverage of more than 80%. The fastest growth in leveraging has been in real estate and industrials - and “materials”. Yes, that means commodities. The IMF makes no specific mentions, but many Western analysts have drawn attention to the fact that there has been multiple financing of metals; that is, one stockpile in a warehouse has been used as collateral for loans from several banks, each bank unaware of the other loans on that same metal.

Now, here’s an item reported overnight by London’s The Daily Telegraph. In the early part of 2012 the graph lines for the S&P 500 and the Deutsche Bank index of raw materials were moving reasonably close to being in unison (although the latter’s dips were more exaggerated). But from about October last year those lines began diverging: the S&P overall rising but the raw materials indexing began faltering, then in the past two months of this year breaking down. The newspaper commented that this divergence was “astonishing to behold, so like the pattern in early 1929”

Part of the problem is that the Federal Reserve has started sending out hints it is going to begin turning off the money supply (which is growing by $89 billion a month, and that’s without the $1 trillion the Japanese are in the process of unleashing).

The fact is, many suspect, that once the floodgates have been opened and all this liquidity injected, you cannot then close the gates again. More and more dollar bills will need to be created just to keep the monetary music going.

The problem is that, this time around, it will not work nearly so well as before.

The big cash splash in late 2008 did wonders to stop the GFC in its tracks, but like antibiotics, the monetary virus has since been building greater and greater immunity to the drugs.

Money is still being pumped out yet in March more Americans lost their jobs, and the US retail and manufacturing sectors contracted. And dare we mention the metal prices again?

Yet we move into this latest part of the cycle with miners around the world (especially in the copper business) gearing up ever increasing output.

Let’s just hope that the music can be kept playing for a while longer.