Thursday 18 March 2010

Government Borrowing "falls" to £5,126 a second

Good News Everybody!

The BBC are reporting that Government borrowing is "only" £12.4Bn in February. Apparently this "isn't as bad as some have feared".

Just to summarise this new debt being forced on us:


  • Every second in February, the Government borrowed £5,126
  • Every minute in February, the Government borrowed £307,540
  • Every hour in February, the Government borrowed £18,452,381 (yes, over £18 Million)
  • Every day in February, the Government borrowed £442,857,143
Let's assume that Lord Ashcroft decided that he should now pay UK tax on all his overseas earnings from his entire life (currently estimated at £125 million) then this will cover UK borrowing for less than seven hours!
If the latest UK winner of the Euromillions Lottery decided to give all their money (all £56 million of it), it would account for only three hours of borrowing!

At the bottom of the linked article, the BBC journo states that: "Moody's agency said the UK's top rating was secure."

Actually, what Moody's said was that: “On balance, we believe that the ratings of all large Aaa governments remain well positioned, although their ‘distance-to-downgrade’ has in all cases substantially diminished”

I.e.: The longer Labour are in power and continue to borrow our grandchildren's money, the more likely we're going to find ourselves stuck in a spiral of debt we'll be unable to control.

2 comments:

  1. No machine has yet been invented that is fast enough to count that even if it's all in £100 notes.

    I suspect that money doesn't really exist, at the end of the day. If it was backed by gold, there would be a huge hole in the earth from whence it was mined.

    I'm just guessing, you realise?

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  2. Uncle Marvo,

    I'm sure the money doesn't exist. Here's another way to think about how much money it is. Get a pound coin out of your wallet and put it on your desk. It's about 22.5mm wide. A line of £1,000 in pound coins will be 22.5m long.

    February’s debt will be a line 279,000,000
    metres long. That's nearly 200 thousand miles.

    Roughly 75% of the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

    The circumference of the Earth is about 40,000km. So our line of Pound Coins from just one month's borrowing could go around the world nearly 7,000 times.

    I don't know about you, but that's one hell of a lot of cash. There's no way it 'exists' in the physical sense. But I'm certain the people we're borrowing it off will want their interest paid.

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