Just after Christmas a number of members of the IEA’s SMPC wrote to the
Sunday Times about the dire need for a fiscal plan to deal with government borrowing. In this context, it is worth coming back to the issue of implicit debt mentioned by Nick Silver in
A Bankruptcy Foretold. He argued that the UK’s real national debt was already 276% of GDP in November 2008 – and this was a conservative (i.e. low) estimate. What has happened recently in terms of projected government borrowing does not increase this larger figure significantly.