That went pretty well, didn’t it? Bank Rate cut to almost zero, followed by a chancellor promising to hose money at everything in sight, and it’s back to business as usual. The word collapse is overused for share prices, but when the FTSE100 falls 10.87 per cent in a single day, it is le mot juste, a half-trillion-pound raspberry to the UK’s policymakers.

Still, never mind. Mark Carney explains that he still has the equivalent of another 2.5 per cent of shot labelled “monetary easing” in his locker, if anyone knows what he means. At least we are to be spared negative interest rates, a move which would have us panic buying those plastic £20 notes and storing them alongside the tins of spam.

It has been said often enough that viruses do not respond to interest rates, and in the real world outside the professional money markets, the cost of borrowing is immune to cuts in Bank Rate, a connection that has been broken ever since the last crash. We are long past the point where cutting interest rates makes us feel better, or awakens animal spirits. So what precisely is our soon-to-be-ex governor hoping to achieve?

Mr Carney is not going to be there long enough to tell us. But he was the Bank governor who gave us “forward guidance”, useful mostly because we could listen to it and bet on the opposite happening. So we must all hope that Andrew Bailey, promoted to governor despite his patchy record at the Financial Conduct Authority, will say less and make better decisions. Since he is the continuity candidate, that may be too much to ask.

 

Stone me

Ah, there’s nothing like a bit of nostalgia to liven up a Budget speech. Of all those wonderful infrastructure schemes that Rishi Sunak dusted off and re-announced, there is none to compare with the Stonehenge tunnel. It has been about to be built almost as long as the stones themselves have been standing, and the thought that it might actually happen has divided us like nothing since Brexit.

Here is Tom Holland writing in Unherd: “The most grotesque act of desecration ever contemplated by a British government, the driving of a great gash of concrete and tarmac through our most significant, our most sacred prehistoric landscape.” You can tell he’s not wildly in favour.

Like other dusty projects, this one is a leftover from George Osborne’s fantasy list when as chancellor he claimed that “we are the builders” and promised the Northern Powerhouse all those years ago. The only novelty is the price tag for the road, now £2bn.

Stonehenge is a wonder, without doubt, but you can only gawp from a safe distance from the stones unless you pay £154 to get among them. For many of us, Stonehenge is best experienced from a slow-moving vehicle eastbound on the A303, where the site magically slides into view and out again. A tunnel would quite spoil that.

Dead but still twitching

He’s such a card, that Matthew Roberts. While the world was collapsing around our heads this week, here was the CEO of shopping centre owner Intu Properties kicking off his results statement with “Our five year strategy”, following up with “the store is not dying, it is evolving”. Well, yes, evolving in the sense that worms eat dead bodies, at least as far as Intu is concerned.

It has been plain for many months that this company cannot survive, yet in the Pollyanna mode pioneered by his predecessor, Mr Roberts seems to think that a £2bn loss, with creditors bearing down on every side, leaves him with “a range of options including alternative capital structures and asset disposals.”

So cheer up and look to “Intu’s fundemental strengths.” Those strengths took the shares to 840p in 2006. The price today: 4.25p. Last February, with the shares down to 119p, I wrote that “this is not the moment to get into the mutt called Intu” . Whatever Mr Roberts may say, the shares are close to worthless. Still, always look on the bright side, rather as his predecessor did in the face of reality. We await the accounts to see how much the benighted shareholders are being forced to pay them for their purblind optimism.