History of the British national debt both government borrowing and the national debt have risen dramatically, reaching around 70% of GDP by the end of 2012. The origins of the British national debt can be found during the reign of William III, who engaged a syndicate of City traders and merchants to offer for sale an issue of government debt. This syndicate soon evolved into the Bank of England, eventually financing the wars of the Duke of Marlborough and later Imperial conquests. The establishment of the bank was devised by Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax, in 1694, to the plan which had been proposed by
Bank of England to hold a minimum fixed proportion of their deposits as reserves at the Bank of England was abolished in 1981: see reserve requirement for more details. The contemporary transition from Keynesian economics to Chicago economics was analysed by Nicholas Kaldor in "The Scourge of Monetarism" On 6 May 1997, following the 1997 general election that brought a Labour government to power for the first time since 1979, it was announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, that the Bank would be granted operational independence over monetary policy. Under the terms of the Bank of England Act 1998 (which