UK crisis: The markets strike back

Liz Truss almost turned the UK into a distrusted emerging economy

For the past few years, governments — especially in the West — have been able to intimidate the markets into silence. Markets have accepted vast expansions of central bank balance sheets, gargantuan borrowing programmes, and fiscal and monetary policy that defied all convention. Anyone would be forgiven for thinking this is the new normal: Unless a country was as close to the brink as, say, Sri Lanka, the markets would quietly accept whatever policymakers handed out.

This belief has come crashing down to earth, and in the single most unlikely country. The United Kingdom was the country that initially invented the