In January 2022 UK inflation was 5.5% and the Bank of England had just made its first rate rise from the pandemic floor. By October inflation was 11.1%, the highest reading in forty-one years. This is the one scenario in the game most players lived through — which makes it the easiest to judge and the hardest to forgive.
Play the 2022 scenario →Through 2021, as inflation climbed out of its pandemic trough, the world's central banks described it with one word: transitory. The reasoning was respectable. Prices were rising because reopening economies had jammed every supply chain at once, and supply chains unjam. Raise rates against a bottleneck and you hit the economy just as the bottleneck clears.
The reasoning was respectable and the call was wrong. Demand ran hotter for longer than the models said, the bottlenecks fed into wages, and then in February 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine and European wholesale gas prices went vertical. Britain buys almost no Russian gas, and it made no difference: gas is priced on a continental market that had just lost its biggest supplier. A bottleneck story became an energy crisis, and every quarter spent waiting for it to pass was a quarter of tightening that now had to happen late.
Inflation 5.5% · Unemployment 3.9% · Bank Rate 0.25% · A balance sheet of £300bn · Twenty quarters, Q1 2022 to Q4 2026
Inflation is nearly three times target and your policy rate is a quarter of one per cent. Every option in front of you is some speed of the same journey: up.
What makes 2022 unlike any other scenario is what you start holding. The asset purchases that fought 2008 and then the pandemic are still on the books, and they work like a hidden cut: the economy behaves as if rates were about a point lower than the number you announce. Hike to 4% and you have delivered something nearer 3%.
You can unwind it — the real Bank began quantitative tightening in 2022, the first major central bank to do so — but selling is capped each quarter, because the exit was designed to be slow. Buying took weeks; leaving takes years. In the game as in reality, the stock you inherited is a decision someone else made that you must now pay for, a quarter at a time.
The Bank raised Bank Rate at fourteen consecutive meetings: 0.25% in early 2022 to 5.25% by August 2023, then held it there for a full year. Inflation peaked at 11.1% in October 2022 and was back near 2% by mid-2024 — brought down partly by the tightening, and substantially by the same arithmetic that had driven it up, as the energy spike dropped out of the annual comparison.
In September 2022 fiscal policy briefly caught fire: a package of unfunded tax cuts sent gilt yields vertical and sterling to an all-time low against the dollar, and the Bank had to intervene in the gilt market it was trying to exit. The game hands you that quarter as an inflationary push and asks you to keep your nerve through it.
Through all of it, the striking thing is what did not happen: unemployment barely moved. It began the period under 4% and ended it under 5%. The disaster scenario — a 1970s wage-price spiral, a decade of double digits — never arrived, because this time the public mostly went on believing inflation would return to target, and it did.
Speed, without panic. Move late and expectations start to slip, and the 1974 spiral is waiting — the passive path in this scenario ends above 20%. But the players who slam the rate to 6% and hold it there discover the other failure: the energy shock was going to fall out of the numbers anyway, and the extra squeeze buys almost no inflation while costing real jobs. The best terms look boring — briskly restrictive, then patient, with the balance sheet quietly shrinking underneath.
The real 2022 was shaped by things this model deliberately leaves out: the Energy Price Guarantee that capped household bills and with them the inflation peak, the fiscal support that held unemployment down, and the gilt-market intervention of that September. The model gives you the shock, the lag, the loaded balance sheet and the base effects — the monetary policy problem, not the whole national one. The full equations are in how the model works.
This scenario ends in late 2026 with inflation at 2.6%, unemployment at 4.9% and Bank Rate at 3.75% — which is exactly the economy the modern game hands you at the start of a fresh term. Play them back to back and you are playing one continuous history: first the crisis, then the inheritance.
Play the 2022 scenario →