Can the UK afford all the extra debt?

by Shaun Richards

I thought that it was time to take stick and consider the overall position in terms of the build up of debt. This has come with a type of economic perfect storm where the UK has begun borrowing on a grand scale whilst the economy has substantially shrunk.So an stand alone rise in debt has also got relatively much larger due to the smaller economy. Hopes that the latter would be short and sharp rather faded as we went into Lockdown 2.0. Although as we look to 2021 and beyond there is increasing hope that the pace of vaccine development will give us an economic shot in the arm.

In terms of scale we got some idea of the flow with Friday’s figures.

Public sector net borrowing (PSNB ex) in the first seven months of this financial year (April to October 2020) is estimated to have been £214.9 billion, £169.1 billion more than in the same period last year and the highest public sector borrowing in any April to October period since records began in 1993.

The pattern of our borrowing has changed completely and it is hard not to have a wry smile at the promises of a budget balance and then a surplus. Wasn’t that supposed to start in 2016? Oh Well! As Fleetwood Mac would say. Now we face a year where if we borrow at the rate above then the total will be of the order of £370 billion.

If we switch to debt and use the official net definition we see that we opened the financial year in April with a net debt of 1.8 trillion Pounds if you will indulge me for £500 million and since then this has happened.

Public sector net debt excluding public sector banks (PSND ex) rose by £276.3 billion in the first seven months of the financial year to reach £2,076.8 billion at the end of October 2020, or around 100.8% of gross domestic product (GDP); debt to GDP ratios in recent months have reached levels last seen in the early 1960s.

You nay note that the rise in debt is quite a bit higher than the borrowing and looking back this essentially took place in the numbers for April and May when the pandemic struck. Anyway if we assume they are now in control of the numbers we are looking at around £2.2 trillion at the end of the financial year if we cross our fingers for a surplus in the self assessment collection month of January.

The Bank of England

How does this get involved? Mostly by bad design of its attempts to keep helping the banks. But also via a curious form of accountancy where marked to market profits as its bond holdings are counted as debt.

If we were to remove the temporary debt impact of these schemes along with the other transactions relating to the normal operations of the BoE, public sector net debt excluding public sector banks (PSND ex) at the end of October 2020 would reduce by £232.9 billion (or 11.3 percentage points of GDP) to £1,843.9 billion (or 89.5% of GDP).

So on this road we look set to end the fiscal year with a net debt of the order of £2 trillion.

Quantitative Easing

This is another factor in the equation but requires some care as I note this from the twitter feed of Richard Murphy.

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Outside Japan QE was unknown until 2009. Since then the UK has done £845 billion of it. This is a big deal as a consequence. But as about half of that has happened this year it’s appropriate to suggest that there have been two stage of QE, so far. And I suggest we need a third.

Actually so far we have done £707 billion if you just count UK bond or Gilt purchases. That is quite a numerical mistake.As we look ahead the Bank of England plans to continue in this manner.

The Committee voted unanimously for the Bank of England to continue with the existing programme of £100 billion of UK government bond purchases, financed by the issuance of central bank reserves, and also for the Bank of England to increase the target stock of purchased UK government bonds by an additional £150 billion, financed by the issuance of central bank reserves, to take the total stock of government bond purchases to £875 billion.

We see that this changes the numbers quite a lot. There are a lot of consequences here so let me this time agree with Richard Murphy as he makes a point you on here have been reading for years.

The first shenanigan is that the so-called independence of the Bank of England from the Treasury is blown apart by the fact that the Treasury completely controls the APF and the whole QE process. QE is a Treasury operation in practice, not a Bank of England one. ( APF = Asset Protection Fund)

Actual Debt Costs

These are extraordinarily low right now. Indeed in some areas we are even being paid to borrow. As I type this the UK two-year yield is -0.03% and the five-year yield is 0%. Even if we go to what are called the ultra longs we see that the present yield of the fifty-year is a mere 0.76%. To that we can add the pandemic effect on the official rate of inflation.

Interest payments on the government’s outstanding debt were £2.0 billion in October 2020, £4.4 billion less than in October 2019. Changes in debt interest are largely a result of movements in the Retail Prices Index to which index-linked bonds are pegged.

As an aside this also explains the official effort to neuter the RPI measure of inflation and make it a copy of the CPIH measure so beloved of the UK establishment via the way they use Imputed Rents to get much lower numbers. I covered this issue in detail on the 18th of this month.

So far this financial year we have paid £24.1 billion in debt costs as opposed to the £33.9 billion we paid in the same April to October period last year.

Comment

The elephant in the room here is QE and by using it on such a scale the Bank of England has changed the metrics in two respects. Firstly the impact on the bond market of such a large amount of purchases has been to raise the price which makes yields lower. That flow continues as it will buy another £1.473 billion this afternoon. Having reduced debt costs via that mechanism it does so in another way as the coupons ( interest) on the debt it has bought are returned to HM Treasury. Thus the effect is that we are not paying interest on some £707 billion and rising of the debt that we owe.

Thus for now we can continue to borrow on a grand scale. One of the ways the textbooks said this would go wrong is via a currency devaluation but that is being neutered by the fact that pretty much everyone is at the same game. There are risks ahead with the money supply as it has been increased by this so looking ahead inflation is a clear danger which is presumably why the establishment are so keen on defining it away.

I have left until the end the economy because that is so unpredictable. We should see some strength in 2021 as the vaccines kick in.But we have a long way to go to get back to where we were in 2008. On a collective level we may need to face up to the fact that in broad terms economic growth seems to have at best faded and at worst gone away.

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