The Panto Season - Madness

A panto was staged the other evening by Newsnight with Dame Violent Elizabeth Tett and three economistas staring into a cauldron of steaming graphs. I felt the chill wind of a more than Shakespearean tragedy looming. The graph which scared the wooly socks off me was the one at the link (image 12 in the slide show) It is titled Chart 1.1 Private sector debt in the UK. Its source is the Office for National Statistics. It expresses that debt as a percentage of GDP and splits the debt into non-financial companies, households and financial companies. In the caption under the graph Ann Pettifor, rightly, points out the comparison between the public debt and the private.

Roughly this is the comparison in 2010 between a poor, wee, sleekit, cowrin, timorous public beastie (~50%) and a private monster (~450%).

Things not to say:-
Interest rates are low:- What forever?
Companies are paying down debt even as we speak:- How much of the £7.5 ish trillion has the private sector paid down in the last 5 minutes and where did they get the capital from?
A big boy called Gordie Broon did it and ran away: Oh no he didn't!
Would you like to consolidate that debt by refinancing sir? Doh!

Questions for the young economist.
How much does it cost to finance this debt?
How much of the profit on the cost finds its way to the Revenue Men.
How much of the profit that does not find its way into the HMRC coffers now sleeps soundly in some tax haven alongside the ill gotten gains of ubercrims and tax dodgers?
Answers please on a used £50 note to Gideon at the usual post box in Zurich.

Full disclosure:-
Having completed his HMRC (Happy) Return, Buddhist Pizza is pleased to announce that he included his Coop. Divi. from which tax has already been deducted and the princely sum of £8 pounds, untaxed, (rounded) which derives from his participation in a Credit Union!

(What about the double blind partnerships which you registered in the Cayenne Islands recently? ...Ed.
Never mind that now!)