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The US-based cable channel is omnipresent in trading rooms, and adopts a brash and sometimes noisy approach to financial news. That can lead to excitement.

Most famously, one of its hosts Jim Cramer loudly proclaimed that the Fed “know nothing” as he banged the table in August 2007, and proclaimed “Armageddon in the fixed income markets”. This was the first time many people grasped that the credit crisis was taking hold.

The “tea party” was christened on CNBC during a rant by its correspondent Rick Santelli in January 2009, while days later the late-night comedy host Jon Stewart memorably eviscerated Mr Cramer, and the network, for failing to spot the crisis coming. Both incidents helped crystallise public disaffection with Wall Street post-crisis.

This week’s on-air meltdown concerned the Federal Reserve. The emotions on display were histrionic, but captured the debate that has dominated the world of asset management for five years.

Janet Yellen, the Fed’s chairwoman, had on Tuesday sent a frisson through the markets by telling Congress that some asset valuations looked stretched. She also warned that if the labour market continued to improve faster than the Fed had anticipated, then the first rises in rates would come earlier than now expected.

In CNBC’s discussion following this, Mr Santelli grew ever angrier. “Who are we helping here? They’re making it worse and they’re not addressing the problem. The Fed wasn’t created to be a feel-good institution.”

He is in the camp that suggests low interest rates have suppressed market discipline, with potentially catastrophic consequences. But when he claimed “history [is] on my side” and stormed off the camera, CNBC’s Steven Liesman replied with a calm list: “It’s impossible for you to have been more wrong. Your call for inflation, the destruction of the dollar and the failure of the US economy to rebound; every single piece of advice you gave would have lost people money.”

It all made good shout-about television. But the underlying debate was critical. So far, those who claimed that QE bond purchases and low interest rates would stoke inflation have been proved wrong. But many still fear that the QE era will end badly.

There are two ways in which they could yet be proved right. One involves the return of inflation as the real economy hums back to life, and money is released from banks and corporate balance sheets. The key test for this is wage growth: once there is a clear sign that workers’ negotiating power is rising, and creating inflationary pressure, then an inflation scare can start.

Ms Yellen herself drew attention to this. As Wells Capital’s Jim Paulsen puts it, the market is only “one bad wages number away from a mindset change”.

A second worry concerns what happens when rates finally begin to rise. Where will the money go?

On this there is already some evidence. Last year, US bond yields rose rapidly after then Fed chair Ben Bernanke speculated about a possible “tapering off” of bond purchases. What ensued is now known as the “taper tantrum” as a group of emerging markets with high current account deficits (the “Fragile Five”) saw their currencies come under attack.

With rates returning to normal in the US, traders no longer needed to take a risk on the higher yields on offer in the emerging world, and exited.

That episode ended when the Fed surprised everyone by not tapering in September. When the Fed eventually tapered in December, it had changed the mood music, trying to emphasise that higher rates were a long way off.

What then happened in Turkey in January is instructive. The Turkish lira came under further pressure. To defend it, the central bank announced, at midnight, that it was more than doubling its core interest rates.

Then, bond yields in the US started their steady drift down, and relieved the pressure. How has Turkey responded? Under political pressure, the bank has cut rates repeatedly, showing that the midnight hike was an aberration. That has been enough to push the Borsa Istanbul index up 44 per cent from its January low. It remains 24 per cent below its pre-taper tantrum high, but the effect has been dramatic. Thanks to falling US bond yields, the lira remains stronger than it was in January.

Nicholas Spiro of Spiro Sovereign Strategy is surely right that the rally is driven by external factors, and complacency. With the bank’s anti-inflationary credentials now in tatters, the consequences for Turkey once the Fed raises rates in earnest could be painful.

For now, seemingly nothing can knock markets off course – not even news of a shot-down airliner in Ukraine, or an Israeli ground offensive in Gaza. But do not be fooled. The drama in Turkey, and the histrionics on CNBC, give an accurate foretaste of what is in store.