Budget day: what does a trillion look like?

This is a day on which you will need to know what a trillion looks like.

We are working on a physical representation of what a trillion pounds looks like. But just for guidance, go to YouTube (see below).

Why do we want to know? Because the chancellor, if he dares mention it, will today unveil what we’re all in for – and it’s got an awful lot of zeroes.

Interestingly, our indebtedness is not the worst in Europe, and is actually not the worst we’ve ever endured. It’s quite a lot smaller than the debt we ran up during the second world war – and somehow we recovered from that.

But today’s grim unemployment figures, 2.1 million, are a reminder that all this stuff is very far from notional. And the people responsible – beyond the political classes who set up the “light-touch regulation” which all parties favoured – number no more than a few thousand in terms of those who managed the institutions in which it all went on.

On this grim day, not one faces prosecution and not one is in jail.