On 10 February, wire services reported that the then interim finance minister Piyush Goyal favoured “printing currency” as a mode of deficit finance, approvingly citing the example of the US. “As finance ministers we are always in need of money,” Goyal said. He added, “I have heard that the US does deficit financing only by printing currency,” a canard that …

The UK’s current account deficit widened to a record high in the final quarter of last year. The deficit in the three months to December was £32.7bn, the equivalent of 7% of GDP, said the Office for National Statistics (ONS). For all of 2015, it came to £96.2bn or 5.2% of GDP. Both figures were the highest since records began …