Via Documentally, here we have Martin Summers talking on the coming economic collapse sparked by the UK and the world’s debt mountain, war, poverty etc. He thinks it’s looking like the 1930s again, maybe even the 1940s.

Martin Summers, the Former East European projects officer for the New Economics Foundation talks about present day money matters as we slide down a slippery sope.

The Office of National Statistics has that the assets and liabilities (there seem to be more of the latter than the former) of Northern Rock must be added to the public balance sheet as of 9th October 2007. This is due to the amount of control the government/treasury has taken over the failing bank and the public-funded support that has been given.

This means that the taxpayer is now facing an official increase in their debt burden of about £100 billion (£100,000,000,000) whether Northern Rock is actually nationalised or not.

£100 billion is a frankly terrifying amount. That’s one-hundred-thousand-million pounds. If you had that much money in pound coins and you laid them flat, edge-to-edge, they’d stretch around the equator over 56 times and they’d weight 3/4 of a million tons. Of course, this little practical excercise would be impossible as it would require 67 times more pound coins than actually exist in circulation.

There won’t be any hard news on whether the bank will be privatised or nationalised until the end of march but even in privatisation, current plans would effectively leave the buyer with the business of Northern Rock while the public gets to continue holding the liability for the debt.

Photo Credit: Alex Gunningham cc-by-2.0