While everyone is pretending that these investor attacks on sovereign political entities which we know as nation states are somehow the fault of the nation states themselves it's impossible to deal with the political reality of what's actually happening - which is that a gang of thugs with baseball bats is kicking in the windows of democracy.

This is an extended economic Kristallnacht. It's soft violence-by-spreadsheet rather than hard violence with a fist to the face. But it's still criminal violence, with immensely destructive consequences - and not the genteel debate about financial niceties that it pretends to be.

Here's a useful graph of UK insolvencies. (The downtick last year was the result of new legislation which created a simplified pseudo-bankruptcy process for certain debtors.)

Considering that Osborne's plan seems to be to move public debt to private households, the next few years aren't going to be a happy experience for many people.