Categories
News

UK borrowing hits highest November level on record – BBC

The Office for National Statistics said borrowing hit £31.6bn last month, the highest November figure on record.

It was also the third-highest figure in any month since records began in 1993.

Since the beginning of the financial year, borrowing to cover the gap between spending and revenues has reached £240.9bn, £188.6bn more than a year ago.

The independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has estimated that the amount could reach £372.2bn by the end of the financial year in March

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55408444

Categories
Publications

UK Economic and fiscal outlook – UK Office for Budget Responsibility

The coronavirus pandemic has delivered the largest peacetime shock to the global economy on record. It has required the imposition of severe restrictions on economic and social life; driven unprecedented falls in national income; fuelled rises in public deficits and debt surpassed only in wartime; and created considerable uncertainty about the future.

…GDP is set to fall by 11 per cent this year – the largest drop in annual output since the Great Frost of 1709.

https://obr.uk/docs/ExecSumm_November_2020.pdf

Categories
Opinion

£6m borrowed for every Covid death: Economist CHRISTOPHER SNOWDON calculates the terrifying price Britain’s paying for the pandemic and asks what HAVE we done? – Daily Mail

The Government has laid waste to the world’s fifth-biggest economy on the basis of dubious projections from risk-averse academics whose jobs are secure no matter what.

…For the truth is that the Government has stared like a wild-eyed fanatic at a single disease with a fatality rate of 0.6 per cent and an average age at death of 82 years, and cast all other considerations to the wind.

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) now predicts GDP falling by between 10.6 per cent and 12 per cent in 2020, the equivalent of the Great Recession of 2008-09 occurring twice in one year. Meanwhile, the OBR expects unemployment to peak next year at between 5.1 per cent and 11 per cent, an estimate so broad as to be meaningless.

…The OBR expects the national debt to hit £2.7trillion within four years and that is probably optimistic given that the Prime Minister is on a permanent spending spree, recently pledging an extra £16.5billion for the military, up to £100billion on the Operation Moonshot mass testing programme and untold billions on achieving net zero carbon emissions.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8994931/6m-borrowed-Covid-death-Economist-calculates-terrifying-price-UKs-paying-pandemic.html