I just pulled the above futures numbers off the Bloomberg site. The recent Eunatics madness has drawn attention away from what’s happening in other sectors apart from sovereign credit. There’s clearly not much confidence out there.

There will be more UK figures released at the ONS site within the next hour or so. Then Merv and his MPCers will huddle for a bit and think about their next move. Sadly, they won’t be interrogating just what a spectacular failure Zirp and QE have been. And this brings me back to confidence.

You can show a nervous consumer or investor that you’re doing something. But you can’t make them do what’s bad for them personally. You can’t inject them with confidence, if there’s little or nothing to be confident about.

This is the big thing that bankers don’t get, because they know nothing about social anthropology and neuroscience….aka, people. I said in 2008 that zero rates would not encourage borrowing if business saw nothing to tool up for. I said at the same time that to take income directly away from the Silvers (the one social group largely free of debt) was a crazy idea that would make the slump worse and be inflationary at the same time. And I predicted that QE would simply be used by multinationals to create dividend cash, and by the banks to rebuild balance sheets/underwrite yet more potty megamergers. What it wouldn’t produce was liquidity in the emerging new economy….the one that must drive growth in the end.

So it has turned out. And worse still, Camerlot has very little awareness of just how silly they were to inherit this policy, and let it run. No balls, you see….no balls. The same old problem.

“Ah but ah but ah but,” whine the naysayers, “that would simply have made the Pound incredibly strong, and both made our debt mountain bigger while stunting the export performance.”

Er….debt mountain bigger? Is it any smaller now? A full blown as opposed to dithering, sabotaged cuts programme would have reduced it far more….and a strong Sterling would’ve made our borrowing incredibly cheap.

Er….what export performance? We’ve had a Pound getting cheaper and cheaper for five years in the EU….and our trade gap with it has got wider still and wider. Does anyone think Germany’s exports to Asia would be affected by a strong euro? Quite.

No imagination. No balls. Same old song, I’m afraid.

As Jeff Randall pointed out earlier this week, in the medium term, Zirp at a personal level has simply encouraged the plastic-bashers to get deeper and deeper into debt doo-doo. And has it really made the banks safer? Does the Pope sh*t in the woods? RBS is as wobbly as it ever was, and Lloyds is still struggling to digest the half-baked HBOS dough it was force-fed two years ago.

Britain’s fiscal policy has been a disaster that’s done nothing except put more extras on the debt scoreboard. George Osborne doesn’t need to fall back on a non-existent Plan B: he needs a more radical approach to the reality of poor performance. But with no balls and no ideas, he is heading for defeat.