Welcome to Britain, 2025. The weather is unpredictable, the trains are late, the bins are full—and the economy is in both rude health and imminent collapse, depending on which paragraph of the OBR’s Economic and Fiscal Outlook you read.
This is not an article about economics. This is an article about stagecraft—the fine art of keeping the show going with the curtains on fire.
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Act I: The Magical Fiscal Deficit
The OBR has spoken. Growth is returning, inflation is falling, and the Chancellor has just enough headroom to deliver tax cuts without blowing the fiscal rules. The national debt may be £2.7 trillion and interest payments surging, but don’t worry—because… something about GDP projections and a 5-year rolling average.
Meanwhile, the UK’s long-dated gilt yields are quietly staging a mutiny. The 30-year is hovering near 5.4%, the 10-year has breached 4.8%, and traders are watching the BoE’s short-term repo facility like it’s a hospital monitor for the pension system.
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Act II: In Which No One Is Being Bailed Out (Except Everyone)
Short-term repo operations are now clocking over £60 billion per week, and climbing. That’s more than the entire annual budget for education. It’s not QE, say the experts—it’s just a casual, opaque, high-speed liquidity transfusion into a completely-not-panicking financial sector.
We’re told this is normal. “Routine collateral top-up,” they say. “No cause for concern.”
Odd, then, that the BoE launched ‘doomsday’ stress tests for the UK’s largest banks in the same month.
Even odder that M2 is quietly rising—by over £120 billion since August—despite headline QT and tightening. One might conclude that liquidity is being injected through the back door while austerity gets paraded through the front like a vaudeville act.
But let’s not speculate. That would be a “conspiracy theory.”
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Act III: The Pension Funds Are Fine (Trust Us)
Remember 2022? The LDI crisis, margin calls, and gilt market death spiral? Of course not, because everything’s fixed now. Pensions are well-hedged, interest rate risks are managed, and solvency is assured—provided the BoE continues providing silent liquidity lifelines indefinitely.
Just ignore that tiny detail where the ONS wiped £2.2 trillion off household wealth by tweaking the discount rate used to value pensions. It’s not a problem. It’s just a revision. A clarification. A small epistemological recalibration of reality.
Some people thought it meant house prices dropped. Others assumed they’d lost all their retirement savings. But don’t worry—the Institute for Fiscal Studies says the new method is “worse than the old one,” so everything balances out.
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Act IV: Schrödinger’s Economy
We are now living in a quantum economy. The system is both solvent and insolvent. The market is calm but requires weekly liquidity injections. Growth is strong, except when it’s not. Public trust is high, provided no one checks the comment section under the OBR’s tweets.
In this economy:
• You are rich until the ONS says you’re not.
• Your pension is safe until the BoE stops propping it up.
• Your grocery bill is falling, unless you’re the one paying it.
• Inflation is under control, unless you live indoors and eat food.
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Final Act: Nothing to See Here
The real crisis isn’t the balance sheet, or the yield curve, or even the repo injections. It’s the collapse of narrative control. The public doesn’t trust the numbers. The experts don’t trust the models. And the politicians are still trying to convince us that perpetual liquidity injections are compatible with a “return to normal.”
But hey—at least the Spring Budget was balanced.
By that, we mean it delicately balanced on a rapidly eroding pile of assumptions, projections, and wishful thinking.
Carry on. All is well.
Unless you look.
Got Bitcoin? bitcoinpolicyuk (npub1z74…d4yx)
I’m getting the feeling the UK may be the trigger for the next big crisis.
#UKFinancialSystemWatch
#FiatCollapse
#SchrödingersBudget
https://obr.uk/economic-and-fiscal-outlooks/
https://youtu.be/6Yui6WioDys?si=iwY1HqbaUMCqMSAI
https://youtu.be/kdtKbjtIp4s?si=I_w5Xd-7FNucJLyR
