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Hello and welcome to More or Less. We are weekly guide to the numbers all around us

in the news and have there been any numbers this week? Only joking, there have been numbers.

Many numbers. As people are muttering about the next wave of Covid, worst sequel ever

if you ask me, we look at what the data are telling us. Gas prices are falling, why aren't

energy bills? To celebrate the reintroduction of fracking, we delve deep into the rickshaw

scale and will ask whether it's true that 4.1 billion people watched the funeral of

Queen Elizabeth II. But first, there's the small matter of what some economic commentators

are calling a full-blown currency crisis. After the new Chancellor's mini budget on Friday,

the 23rd, the pound lurched downwards on currency markets and lurched again early the following

Monday morning, briefly touching all-time record lows. Well here at More or Less, we were

following the collapse in the pound well before it was cool. Last week, I discussed it with

the economist Duncan Weldon, the author of the Economic History book, 200 years of

modelling through. So I asked Duncan to return to the microphone to continue the story.

But I don't want to talk about the pound just yet. I want to talk about the budget. First,

the mini budget. The increasingly inappropriately named mini budget. I'm trying to work out one

way of looking at this budget is famously the biggest tax-cutting budget since the early

1970s, 1.5% of GDP. Another way of looking at it is it's just rolled back the tax increases

that were planned and all we've done has gone back a year according to the Institute for

Physical Studies. So should we be awed by the scale of the tax cutting or should we be

entirely underwhelmed by the lack of ambition? I think it's a little bit of both. So in

absolute terms, and as a share of GDP, biggest tax-cutting budget in 50 years, but it's true

...