It has been hard in recent days not to think about debt. Not mine, you understand, but that of the government, which I suppose is indirectly mine, too. You will have heard politicians say many times that they are taking tough decisions to avoid saddling future generations with unacceptable debt. We may even hear that from the chancellor next month.
I don’t what to depress anybody, but we may already be part of those “future generations”. Twenty years ago, when public sector net debt was about 30 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), it would have seemed unlikely that we would have got so quickly to the roughly 100 per cent it is now.
Debt has been on my mind because two important reports