It’s election day in Britain, and God knows what will happen. But a lot of the campaign has revolved around the question of what was really going on in the spring of 2010. Cameron/Osborne want everyone to believe that Britain was in crisis, and was saved only by austerity. Is that really how it was?

Not according to the markets. Interest rates in the UK were low, but it’s not easy to use rate spreads as an assessment of risk — the way you can for eurozone countries — because Britain borrows in its own currency. So this is one place where CDS spreads may be informative.

Here, then, are CDS spreads in and around the election period of 2010, as reported by the Atlanta Fed:

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The UK is that line at the bottom, just above the United States. (I continue to be bemused by the very idea of CDS on US debt, since a world with America in default is probably one of Mad Max anarchy, but never mind.) What you see is that the markets were never worried, at all, about British solvency.