8 September

Since the Second World War, the increasing prosperity of average people has been a mirage. We've looked and felt richer, but it's mostly the result of increasing levels of personal debt. While the well-off have taken the overwhelming share of society's wealth, everybody else is having to borrow to get ahead. At the same time governments have thumped their chests about surpluses. Those surpluses are bought by the average person using debt to maintain their standard of living. Check out the personal debt to GDP ratio graph below for the past 40 years. Any government who crows about a surplus is spitting in the eyes of its own citizens.