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Welcome to the briefing room with me, David Aronovich.

You know the setup.

There's you, me, top experts, a virtual meeting room and 28 minutes.

This week, the pandemic, How Broke, is Britain?

Yeah. How Broke is Britain? This week, the Chancellor of the Exchequer told us that the country was in big economic trouble.

Unemployment was set to rise to 2.6 million and borrowing to keep us afloat this year to nearly 400 billion pounds.

So how long can we keep on doing this before Britain goes broke?

Step inside the briefing room and together we'll find out.

First, we need to understand a few things like what is a debt and what is a deficit and just how big and bad both actually are.

Joining me to advise on the state of things is Judge Ichada, Director of the National Institute of Economic Research.

Judge Chada, could you just run me through our current statistics on debt, proportion of public spending to GDP,

and tell us what the importance of each is?

The country in every year produces a certain amount of goods and services, and that's defined

as its income or its production, and that's called GDP, gross domestic product.

And the best way to think about the level of public debt we have, what the government has

borrowed is relative to that measure of output or GDP. And so what we currently have in the middle of

this COVID crisis is that debt has gone up relative to GDP and looks to be about

the same level as the output in the economy, which broadly speaking means that the government

has borrowed as much as the size of the economy itself. In normal times, we would expect that

number to be something like 40% of GDP, so less than half the value of the goods and services

that reduce in any year. Right now, it's about the same size. Now, stepping away from the

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