At present, as many as 7 Member States of the EU have public debts exceeding 100 per cent, with the limit laid down in the Maastricht Treaty at 60 per cent. In the US, the scale of the Fed’s quantitative easing related to the pandemic has been as much as 57 per cent higher than during the financial crisis.

Despite the unprecedented fiscal and monetary expansion, in 2020 the US interest expenditure on public debt was a mere 1.7 per cent of GDP – half the level noted 30 years before. Today, the Bank of England speaks of climate more often than of inflation and the macroeconomic situation.