Essay / Political economy
The age of cheap certainty is ending
Governments built a decade of policy on calm markets; the bill now arrives in votes, ports and power grids.
For fifteen years the rich world treated low rates as weather: occasionally inconvenient, broadly dependable and too large to argue with. Ministries borrowed as if bond markets were sleepy civil servants. Companies stocked lean shelves from Shenzhen to Rotterdam and called the arrangement resilience.
A thinner margin for error
The reversal is not a single crisis but a change in the price of mistakes. A delayed rail link in northern England now collides with dearer debt. A subsidy in Ohio must survive a battery glut in Guangdong. Even capable governments discover that execution, not announcement, is the scarce resource.
The hard lesson of expensive money is that politics can no longer outsource discipline to tomorrow.
Voters sense this before spreadsheets do. They do not ask for abstraction; they ask why a hospital corridor is still full in April, why the harbour cranes wait for parts, and why every tax cut seems to arrive with a small print invoice.