IW Long Reads: Don't look up - should investors be scared of the global coronavirus debt mountain?

Counting the cost of the pandemic - and how to pay it off

Covid-19 support programmes have ballooned global governments' debts, creating unhelpful comparisons to profligate household budgets and a 'TINA environment' for equities: There Is No Alternative. The UK is forecast to borrow £392bn this year to plug the worst effects of the pandemic, the most in real terms since World War II. A throwback from the 2008 Global Financial Crisis has re-emerged - that debt-burdened states are like households where borrowings must be honoured fast on pain of ruin. "The fiscal dynamics of a government and a household are fundamentally different. It's like comparing...