2011 in numbers
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You're listening to a more or less podcast from the BBC. For more information about the programme, please go to the website bbc.co.uk slash radio4. Hello, and if you're listening to our Sunday repeat, Happy New Year. This is a special edition of More or Less, and it'll serve as a guide to interesting, informative, or just plain idiosyncratic numbers of the year. The credit crunch and the continuing financial crisis have made really big numbers a familiar part of our news bulletins and everyday language – Billions and trillions are tossed around as though they're just a step away from each other, but a couple of letters makes all the difference. After all, there are a thousand billions in each trillion.
And roll over trillions, there's a new kid on the block.
My number of the year is a quadrillion. That is a thousand trillions, or one followed by 15 zeros. Not a number that many of us would have had come across, especially in the context of the total amount of debt, because that's when this number, which is rarely used, was first raised.
It's a number mentioned just recently by a Japanese vice minister when he was talking about the level to which Japanese government debt could climb. He forecast that by March of next year, the total amount of government debt in Japan could exceed a quadrillion. Now, let me make it clear that is in Japanese yen. So in dollar terms, it's about 13.8 trillion yen. And that number is astounding. And it is more than twice the size of the entire Japanese economy. But I suppose for me, we've now gotten to a place where the amount of public sector debt is being expressed in numbers that we would have never come across before is symptomatic of some of the ailments afflicting the world economy right now. Another couple of numbers which I think captures this very well, which is the median debt-to-GDP ratio of developed economies versus developing economies.
If you take the G20, you break them up into developed economies and emerging economies, you'll see that this is the very first time outside of world wars in which the debt levels of the developed economies is higher than that of developing economies. For developed economies in the G20, it's 80% of GDP. That is twice as high as it is for emerging economies in the G20.
Linda Yu of Oxford University and Bloomberg Television. And a quadrillion yen in debt, by the way, is 7,846,186 yen, or about £65,000 for every man, woman and child in Japan. Staying with money, let's get something a bit closer to home from Moneybox reporter Ben Carter. This number will have affected a lot of people this year. 137. That's the amount in pence it would have cost you to buy a litre of unleaded petrol on May 9th when petrol prices hit an all-time high. But why was the price of petrol so high when the price of oil itself was 20% lower than its 2008 peak? In July 2008, the price of Brent crude oil hit a record $147 a barrel. In May of this year, it was roughly $112. So people were justifiably asking why petrol prices were higher than they were in 2008 when unleaded petrol was £1.20 a litre.
There are three reasons for this. Despite the government reducing the fuel duty by a penny in this year's budget, it's still nearly eight pence more than it was in 2008. Currently 57.85 pence of every litre sold is taken in duty. The second reason is an obvious one. VAT has gone up to 20%. Around 23 pence in every litre is taken in VAT. So the government's total share is roughly 65% of the price of each litre. The third reason is the exchange rate. Barrels of oil are priced in dollars, and in 2008 the pound was a lot stronger against the dollar than it is now. So at the peak, $147 a barrel equated to around £74. In May, an $112 barrel of oil, the price was around £70. To put things in context, if the exchange rate and tax had remained at 2008 levels, we'd only have been paying £1.11 as opposed to £1.37.
However, if the price per barrel gets back to 2008 levels, then under the current taxation and exchange rate, we'd be paying over £1.50 per litre.
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