The national economic obsession is with repaying the national debt. But, very few people know what it in the national debt (including, I now realise, the Office for National Statistics) and even fewer realise why it's all pretty useful stuff. In fact, I can't work out a reason why we'd want to repay any of it when the cost of having it is falling, steadily. This is what I explore here:
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
There are links to this blog's glossary in the above post that explain technical terms used in it. Follow them for more explanations.
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Buy me a coffee!
I really like this one – it throws the onus to explain back on the “opposition”.
I would also note that Singapore that has routinely has fiscal surpluses and no need to borrow still chooses to have a SGD Bond market of about SGD 200bn ….. for many of the reasons you point out.
Excellent explanation! I’ll definitely be sharing that 🙂
“Dr. Strangefund or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the National Debt”
(With apologies to Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers…)
Not for publication …
In your video ‘What numbers mean.’ at 5.33 you say “a trillion is a billion billion”. You sort of correct it in the next bit but given the topic, I thought you might want to correct it.
And, thank you for the series: clear, succinct, necessary and, let’s hope, influential.
Noted
Thanks
A UK Billion was a million million and it was the USA billion that was only 1000 million. You have to watch out a bit, though, as in German a Billionen is the old British 1 000 000 000 000, while what we call a billion is a Milliarden (1 000 000 000).
Note to Rishi: when we leave the EU proper, and get back our sovereignty, we can denominate the national debt in old UK billions. It’ll look pretty manageable then.
That made me stumble too. It took me a bit to work out from context that you were saying that as an example of a misconception, but it’s easy to take it the wrong way. So many pitfalls in script-writing!
Very useful and succinct. As an ancient and hard of hearing old lecturer I admired it and particularly welcomed the subtitling but wondered if ‘Bank of England Guilts’ was sardonic.
Richard
Any chance of getting an orthodox economist or politician-economist to respond ?
If they want to
Tut tut Richard, you are wrecking the planned build up for another decade of austerity! How on earth are they (the government) going to make us destitute and finalise privatising the NHS and all the rest if they don’t have the ‘debt’ excuse? If we know there isn’t anything to pay back, how will they line their own pockets?
In the last round of austerity, did they not create more debt in the end? Has no one mentioned to them it doesn’t work?
I have a feeling the BBC won’t be broadcasting your video, which is an even better explanation than your Twitter thread btw: so you should send it to them to see if they like it,,,
🙂
Richard,
First up, thanks for that. Clear enough for a non-economist like myslef.
One of the things I hear bandied about in some parts of the presss is that some of the debt goes back to the Napoleonic Wars. Is this true? Or are they just messing about with statistics?