little small blip in what is, in their view and mine, a continuing upwards trend, which gets more and more vertical in the debt ratio, largely as a result of the expenses of Medicare and Medicaid and so on over time. And the same is exactly true for the UK. If you look at the Office for Budget Responsibility, the OBR, and you look at their long-term projections, you will see that under present policies with existing taxes and existing policies on retirement ages, Medicare, Medicaid, etc., that the debt ratio effectively explodes. And that will be made a lot worse if nominal interest rates start rising quite sharply. Which is obviously what's happened in the very recent past. Indeed. Now, the indication of that, according to, for example, John Cochran of Stanford University, is that the underlying situation is inevitably going to be increasingly inflationary because the Ministers of Finance, the Secretary of the Treasury, simply cannot afford to pay out these large sums and will have (28/43)