Enthusiasts for a 21st century British industrial revival have long asked themselves: "What can we sell to China?" David Cameron's no-expenses-spared trade junket last week yielded at least one answer: pig semen. Environment minister Owen Paterson, also on the trip, proudly announced a £45m deal under which China's sows will be impregnated with the aforementioned British pork product.

If you think there's something faintly desperate (not to mention Thick of It-esque) about Britain's top politicians flying thousands of miles to discuss the procreation of farmyard animals, you'd be right – and a close reading of the latest snapshot of Britain's economy by the Office for Budget Responsibility, published alongside last week's autumn statement, reveals why.

When sterling dropped like a stone at the time of the financial crisis, losing more than 20% of its value against the currencies of our major trading partners, economists and politicians – even those who had never lamented the slow, painful death of large swaths of British manufacturing – gleefully predicted an export renaissance.

Yet as the OBR acknowledged last week, it has repeatedly failed to materialise. They expect Britain's share of world trade to continue declining; and net exports to act as a drag on economic growth this year, to make precisely no contribution in 2014, and boost GDP by just 0.1 percentage points in 2015. Hardly what George Osborne refers to as Britain "paying its way in the world".

That knotty question of what China's voracious consumers might want to buy from us gives a pretty good idea of the scale of the problem. There's tourism, of course – Karl Marx's grave, in London's Highgate cemetery, is on many a Chinese itinerary. But that's Britain as a heritage brand– the same could arguably be said about the draw of our ancient universities – and cemetery tours are hardly suitable for mass production.

Luxury cars are a good bet: China's elite love nothing better than a spot of ostentatious consumption. Overall, the car industry moved into a small trade surplus at the start of 2013, which is to be cheered, and China played its part, consuming more than 8% of British car exports, up from 1.4% in 2008. But a box in the OBR report entitled car consumption and production explains why that's not the route to an export-led revival either.

After many years of being swallowed up by overseas buyers, battered by the overvalued pound and hamstrung by the reluctance of the banks to back boring old widget-makers instead of yacht-owning property magnates, Britain's carmakers are better at bolting together bits from abroad than creating products from start to finish.

Or as the OBR puts it, even when we successfully export cars, "the impact on GDP is limited, as domestic car production uses nearly three times more imports for every pound of output than the economy as a whole. So while … car trade in isolation has helped reduce the UK's trade deficit, the overall effect on the economy has been less positive."

The other prize industry much talked about during last week's trip was banking. Unlikely as it seems, given the near-daily diet of revelations about rate-fixing, mis-selling and other scandals, the City appears to be the front-runner to be the major offshore trading centre for the yuan. That should help Britain to sell other financial services too; but it is hardly in the spirit of a "march of the makers".

Meanwhile, another sorry chapter in the OBR's report told of the latest postponement of the upturn in business investment it has repeatedly predicted since 2010. Whether it's because of financing constraints or consumer confidence, business investment is more than 25% lower than in 2008, and has continued to fall this year. The OBR now expects it to bounce back, by 5.5%, in 2014, and grow at a healthy clip thereafter. We'd better hope it's right: without investing, it's hard to see how businesses can diversify and seek out new markets – and for Cameron and co, cheering the sale of another batch of pig semen may be as good as it gets.

Someone's coining it



Bitcoin is not a currency – it is a bubble, says Alan Greenspan. Indeed, one dictionary definition of currency is a system of money in general use in a particular country, and bitcoin was created to be stateless. Proposed by a mysterious mathematician calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, the digital phenomenon is above all a beautifully calculated social experiment.

Bitcoins are "mined", or created, in blocks of 50 and distributed to collectives as a reward for using their combined computer processing power to solve increasingly complex algorithms. These create a log recording the growth and distribution of bitcoin.

Satoshi formed the first digital coins using the clay of his own computing power, then vanished into the clouds to watch his creation populate the earth. Satoshi decreed that only 21m Bitcoins could be created, and so far there are 12m. But the coins are divisible, by up to eight decimal places. The smallest unit is called a Satoshi, and 2.1 quadrillion (that's 14 zeros) of them could eventually exist, said to be sufficient for the Satoshi to become global currency.

And bitcoin's value is growing. In 12 months its value has risen from $14 a coin to more than $1,000. No one knows who Satoshi is, but he is now a billionaire: records show he retained 1.2m coins, known as the genesis block.

Greenspan says bitcoin has no intrinsic value and is not issued by entities who can be trusted. People whose work helped create bitcoin, such as IT engineer Gavin Andresen, counter that its worth lies in freedom from often unfair state control. It can be exchanged for real money and offers the ability to instantly, and at very low cost, pay anybody in the world.

The virtual currency spiked when it was used to smuggle money out of Cyprus earlier this year, and its use is spreading in China, where official foreign exchange controls are draconian.

To misquote the science fiction writer William Gibson, the future of money is already here and it is becoming more evenly distributed.

Rewards for snitching are too great

The Libor scandal is still casting a long shadow over the financial sector. The European commission last week imposed £1.4bn of fines on six companies for colluding in fixing the key Euribor and yen Libor rate benchmarks.

A painful price. But one that could have been much more punishing if the Swiss bank UBS, which blew the whistle on the cartel that was rigging yen Libor, had not escaped its £2.1bn fine as a reward for alerting the authorities to the scandal. Barclays similarly dodged a £570m fine for confessing to the rigging of another benchmark.

For turning supergrass, the two banks received total immunity from any fines. This compares very nicely with the banks' dealings with the Financial Services Authority, which granted Barclays a 30% reduction in its fine for Libor-rigging and UBS a more stingy 20% reduction.

The prospect of a 100% discount may well have helped motivate the two banks' decision to shout loudly to Europe's competition watchdog, but surely this is not the way to handle such cases of widespread wrongdoing.

The banks profited – or intended to profit – from their collusion in rigging rates. Even if they then point the finger at others, they should still be made to pay the major part of the fine they would have faced.