No one could argue the numbers in Britain’s budget were too small. On October 30th Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, laid out over £40bn ($52bn) in tax rises, more than any budget has raised in at least half a century. Borrowing went up, too. Ms Reeves loosened the rules constraining borrowing to invest, and then ran close to the limit of her newly generous yardstick. The result was a package of fiscal easing worth nearly 1% of GDP, an amount without much recent precedent outside recessions and pandemics. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), a fiscal watchdog, reckons that stimulus could push inflation up by 0.4 percentage points at peak; gilts sold off sharply as markets absorbed the news.