The British electorate (2008) have been told that Britain has little in the way of National Debt and is well placed to ride out the coming recession. The currency markets have taken a different view. Why? The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD 2006) gives figures for National Debt that show that the UK had a Gross National Debt that was around 50% of GDP in 2008 before the Credit Crunch. However, the UK government differs from some of the other OECD countries because it does not declare the most important source of debt: public pensions. Government liability to service public pensions now stands at over £1000,000,000,000, yes £1 trillion (Institute of Economic Affairs 2006) If the pension liabilities of the UK government and other undeclared debts such as the Public Finance Initiative are added to their declared liabilities then UK debt is around 120% of GDP. This is second only to Japan amongst the large global economies. However, Japan has a huge ...