This article is more than 1 year old

UK national debt hits 1.46 Apples – and weighs as much as 2 billion adult badgers

Or 16.9 NHS budgets, in financial terms

Reg Standards Converter British national debt has topped £2tn – meaning the country is now collectively in hock for 16.9831 yearly NHS Budgets, just under 22,442 Paul Pogbas, or, if you're really smart and original, close to 1.46 Apple Incs.

News of just how far the UK has sunk into the red was revealed by the BBC, which sliced and diced figures published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

"The government now owes the equivalent of 100.5 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) – the total value of all the goods and services produced in the economy," said the Beeb.

It is the first time debt has been above 100 per cent of GDP since the 1960-61 financial year, the ONS said.

The figure of £2,004,000,000,000 is the equivalent of 16.9 of the NHS's annual budget for 2016, as can be divined from the ever-handy Reg Standards Converter. Although the state-run healthcare provider had a budget back then of £118bn, in FY2019 this had increased to £140bn.

National debt is also over 22 thousand times the value of 2016's most valuable footballer, Paul Pogba, who was bought by Manchester United from Juventus for a reported £89.3m in August that year. The ridiculous transaction gave rise to the standardised Reg unit of the Pogba (Pb) as a readily understood unit of wealth.

UK debt is therefore equivalent to 22,441Pb, which is enough to play a thousand professional football games with two full-strength sides if you had a cloning machine and a time travel machine handy, as all good Reg readers do.

As quite a few people have been joking on Twitter this morning, the national debt can also be expressed in multiples of Apple. Tim Cook's troupe hit a record market capitalisation of $2,000,000,000,000 just the other day. It has since dropped to about $1.8 trillion. At current rates (assuming you wouldn't just make a bank transfer of such a ridiculously large sum to Apple shareholders, so proper money market rates) this is correctly expressed at the time of writing as £1,368,870,000,000 or about 68 per cent of the UK national debt.

Whatever use you put this knowledge to, just remember that the weight of the national debt expressed in £1 coins is equivalent to that of approximately two billion adult badgers, or just over 33,775 times the weight of the Las Vegas Linq hotel's annual recycling. Whatever the measure, the Reg Standards Soviet has your back, comrades. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like