In an attempt to cheer us all up Matt Ridley remarked in a Times column last Saturday that ‘Allowing for a few mathematical wrinkles, the world cannot be in debt.’
Well, that is true, by accountants definition, in the same way that the world cannot have a balance of trade deficit: one country’s import is another country’s export which (allowing for a few exchange rate wrinkles) must add up to a net balance of zero; similarly, each country’s international borrowing is another country’s lending.
When the Large Hadron Collider was about to start its work we were bombarded with stories about how the physicists might, not altogether wittingly, create their own Black Hole which would swallow up the whole world.
Suppose the rocket scientists who run our modern faster-then-the-speed-of-thought financial casinos have succeeded in creating a world full of wormholes, vibrating strings of ETFs, through which we are all about to disappear into a black hole, the only kind of debt-free universe which is now possible.
