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This is a weird election in many respects, but none more so than the economic battleground on which it is being fought.

For the past few decades there has been a clear economic identity associated with each of the political parties.

On the one extreme you've had the Tories, pledging to bear down on the public finances with fiscal rules that pledged to cut the national debt and ensure that by the middle of the next decade tax receipts would fully fund the public sector.

On the other extreme you've had the Labour party pledging to spend and invest billions more.

The Liberal Democrats were always somewhere in the middle.

But ever since Boris Johnson became Prime Minister and Sajid Javid Chancellor, that landscape has been thrown into confusion.

The new Chancellor has ditched those old, ambitious (some would say too ambitious) fiscal rules and replaced them with ones which allow him to borrow far more.

In a rather unusual turn-up for the books, one of his fiscal rules is actually almost identical to Labour's respective rule.

And now into this slightly confusing landscape strides Sir Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat deputy leader, claiming to have stolen the Conservative mantle of being the "only party of sound finance."

In a speech a few days ago Sir Ed said: "Just look at the contrast with the other two parties.

"The spending competition between the Brexit parties, the Labour and Conservative fantasists, has made Santa Claus seem like Scrooge.

"So while the Conservatives may attack Labour on spending - the truth is both the old parties are now fiscally incontinent."

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Is Sir Ed right? Do the Lib Dems really have the tightest fiscal plans of all? Are the other parties now fiscally incontinent?

For the answer you need to consider the new fiscal rules each party has put in place.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, let's get one important thing out of the way.

All three of these UK parties are planning to spend much more on investment.

The Tories have thrown out their rule aiming for an overall budget balance by the middle of the next decade.

Instead they want to achieve a balanced current budget.

The two things might sound similar, but there's a crucial difference: the current budget excludes investment and covers only day-to-day costs.

None of the major parties are proposing anything as stringent as the old Conservative rule: all of their plans imply that the government will carry on borrowing, will carry on recording deficits for the foreseeable future.

They'll do this by simply excluding investment spending from their main rules.

Whoever wins, austerity as we knew it really does seem to have come to an end.

Since we're talking about public investment, it's worth asking whether the Liberal Democrats are the "sound money" party on this front. And the answer is: not really.

In his speech, Sir Ed signalled that his party would borrow and invest an extra £130bn to spend on infrastructure and their green investment plans over the next Parliament.

That actually works out at more than the Tories, whose new investment rule implies perhaps £100bn or so of extra investment. Labour, as you've probably guessed, plan to spend even more on investment.

How about the current budget, in other words the rules on day-to-day spending?

Here, the Lib Dem rules look, on the face of it, very tough indeed.

They've adopted a recommendation from the Resolution Foundation to target a 1% current surplus.

That's in stark contrast to both the Tories and Labour - hence Sir Ed's claim that the other parties have given up on sound finance.

But there is an important bit of small print Sir Ed has forgotten to mention.

That Resolution Foundation rule allows for a large amount of flexibility.

If there's a recession or a significant slowdown, the government would be allowed to run a current deficit (in other words to borrow to finance day-to-day spending) of 1% of GDP.

This, it turns out, would be even more fiscally loose than either the Labour or Tory plans.

So while the Lib Dem rules might talk a little tougher than the Tory ones, in the event of a recession (and let's not forget we're probably overdue one of those) they would be considerably looser.

Still, there's a good argument to say that that's precisely the way governments should behave.

Interest rates are down at around zero.

If there is another crunch there will be even more onus than usual on the government to step in and support the economy.

So the Lib Dem rules look pretty sensible on this front.

But implying that they are tougher than the Tory or indeed Labour ones is going a bit far.

Instead they look, as ever, to be somewhere in the middle.

The main takeaway? All the parties have loosened their fiscal rules considerably and the era of tight public finances is about to give way to, well, the opposite.

Campaign Check scrutinises election claims made by political parties, examining if they are true or false, and the context. Sky News is working with Full Fact - the leading independent fact-checking charity.

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