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.

And I should learn to proofread better.

And it's not quite true that you can't short a currency unless the CB is being a sucker. The CB is just the most common sucker in a Soros attack, but any entity that has domestic currency lying around in large quantities can be the sucker.

Also, if your CB is not committing to defend a lower bound, it should be brokering currency swaps between foreign central banks and domestic firms that are considered to be of strategic importance and require imports of raw materials or intermediate goods. That way, you would minimise disruptions in the event of a Soros attack that you find yourself unable to defend against.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.