£6m borrowed for every Covid death: Economist calculates terrifying price UK's paying for pandemic:
As for Britain's public finances, to say they are in ruins would be an understatement.
At the start of the year, the OBR expected public sector net borrowing to be £55billion in 2020-21.
In the summer, that jumped to £322billion. The OBR's latest forecast, published this week, expects it to rise to £394billion. The additional £339billion debt incurred to deal with Covid is the equivalent of £6million for every person who has died with the virus.
Government debt in total has passed the £2trillion mark for the first time and will amount to 105 per cent of GDP in 2020-21, its highest level since the 1950s.
The OBR expects the national debt to hit £2.7trillion within four years and that is probably optimistic given that the Prime Minister is on a permanent spending spree, recently pledging an extra £16.5billion for the military, up to £100billion on the Operation Moonshot mass testing programme and untold billions on achieving net zero carbon emissions.
Such gargantuan levels of borrowing are only vaguely sustainable if interest rates remain at historic lows for many years to come, but that is largely out of the Government's hands.
And let's not forget that the low interest rates needed double up as a stealth tax on savers.
Meanwhile, much of what is called borrowing is essentially money-printing.
So far this year, the Bank of England has conjured up £450billion through quantitative easing – the respectable name for debasing the currency – which it lends to the Government by buying bonds.
