Making Financial Headlines · Page 10

Treasury Calculates the Fund That Might Have Been

October 23, 2026 at 6:01 PM EDT · New York time

Britain's Treasury has calculated for the first time how much the country could have accumulated by investing North Sea proceeds, BBC Business reports. The exercise concerns a hypothetical oil fund, not an existing trillion-pound account awaiting a forgotten password. The distinction is central to assessing the result. A counterfactual investment history can illuminate earlier choices, but it cannot supply present financing or establish that every assumed return would have occurred. Government accounting has discovered an especially comfortable kind of wealth: the money one might have had. Its chief drawback is that public services continue to request payment in the less cooperative actual variety.

Satire. Not factual reporting. Read the original reporting from the linked publishers.