How many olympic football sized double decker elephant buses is that?
UK national debt hits 1.46 Apples – and weighs as much as 2 billion adult badgers
British national debt has topped £2tn – meaning the country is now collectively in hock for 16.9831 yearly NHS Budgets, just under 22,442 Paul Pogbas, or, if you're really smart and original, close to 1.46 Apple Incs. News of just how far the UK has sunk into the red was revealed by the BBC, which sliced and diced figures …
COMMENTS
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Monday 24th August 2020 10:58 GMT Jellied Eel
Soo..
£1=1.25cm^3 approx
Therefore debt is roughly equivalent to:-
998.8542 Olympic sized swimming pools
431313200.3232 footballs
And of course
4774637127.5783 gf (grapefruit)
Conversion to walnuts would almost certainly lead to an explosion of squirrels, and thus the BoE is not considering it at this time. In a bid to provide jobs* however, 1,000 new swimming pools would be a great way to ease congestion** and get the nation back to health.
*Which gets me thinking. Could you build 1,000 new pools for £2tn or less?
**Unless each pool contained 431,000 footballs as a store of wealth. Given the cost of a football exceeds £1 however, this would be inflationary, although provide additional jobs managing inflation.
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Monday 24th August 2020 12:22 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: To put that in context
As the saying goes, you spend a billion here and a billion there - soon you're talking serious money...
Although does that spending a million a day include for compound interest?
In fact, launches spreadsheet: spend 365m per year and pay 2% interest on the total debt at the end of the year - I get to £2tn national debt after "only" 238 years. Which doesn't even take us back to Norman the Conqueror, let alone Stonehenge...
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Friday 21st August 2020 16:44 GMT TVU
"UK national debt hits 1.46 Apples – and weighs as much as 2 billion adult badgers"
Well, we can get a large instant saving by axing the huge £110 billion unnecessary excrescence that is HS2 not only because Covid-19 has advanced homeworking and reduced the need to commute by a decade but also because significant journey time cuts are now already available by using Hitachi's new Intercity Express Trains that run on existing standard rail tracks.
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Monday 24th August 2020 09:56 GMT Evil_Goblin
Having seen the amount of incompetent people who have been safely "employed" on HS2 already, I think that if that £110bn is keeping them out of the wider world of work for the next decade then that is money well spent.
Ultimately all these big infrastructure projects are just ways of getting around state aid rules and funnel public money to the private sector. The (non)delivery or success of the final output is somewhat irrelevant.
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Friday 21st August 2020 23:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
The majority of UK state debt is owed to the Bank of England.
The Bank of England is owned in full by a single civil service post (not the holder) within the treasury.
Unless you are extremely pedantic the UK government owes itself most of the money.
Can’t say how other countries central banks are structured. Many will be private banks.
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Monday 24th August 2020 09:01 GMT veti
Mostly, it's owed to rich people.
Government debt, in most first world countries at least, is considered about the safest commodity you can buy. So when the economy is in the crapper, rich people rush to lend their money to governments that, they think, will most likely not rat on it.
This is the real reason to want to reduce debt: it's money from tomorrow's taxpayers that will go to the people who need it least. It's also, of course, why there's an unholy alliance between left and right wing politicians to keep growing the debt, whatever happens.
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Monday 24th August 2020 08:43 GMT Doogie Howser MD
So it goes
Well while world leaders continue to over react to a virus that statistically has minimal risk to the man (or woman, or gender fluid) in the street, this is bound to happen. Reverse the lockdown, manage at risk groups (mainly care home residents) and get rid of those virtue signaling, placebo based "face coverings".
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Monday 24th August 2020 09:01 GMT veti
Re: So it goes
Yeah, cos that worked so well for Sweden...
There is no way of fixing the economy without getting the pandemic under control first. The US is an abject lesson in what happens if you insist on seeing it as a tradeoff - you get a huge economic crash *and* a huge pile of dead people, both at the same time.
New Zealand, on the other hand - has (until ten days ago) no covid-19 and unemployment that actually went *down* in the first half of the year. Now it's got a new outbreak, but it's far better placed to take care of it than most anyone in Europe.
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Monday 24th August 2020 09:59 GMT Evil_Goblin
Re: So it goes
But NZ only has a population of 5m and most of it is in relatively low density accommodation compared to Europe / UK etc - all much easier to deal with.
Not denying that Ms Arden has certainly made a great fist of it and showed more leadership that most of the rest of the world, but circumstances have definitely helped.
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Wednesday 26th August 2020 16:42 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: So it goes
Low density is not an argument against how well NZ have dealt with this. Yes the country as a whole has very low population density, however the majority of the country are packed into the two main cities, so actually has quite high population density based upon occupied land.
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Monday 24th August 2020 11:49 GMT deadlockvictim
Standardisation
El Reg» UK debt is therefore equivalent to 22,441Pb...
Shouldn't this be 22.4 KPbs, that is, 22.4 Kilopogbas?
What with the U.K. leaving Europe and all of that, isn't it time to reject decimalisation and all of its works?
The U.S. has shown that how easy it is to live with Imperial measurement system. You need something truly intuitive like LSD — pound-shillings-pence for those too young to remember. The Sixties, well, the early Seventies really, were a time of experimentation with wacky new ideas.