History of the British national debt History of the British national debt The history of the British national debt can be traced back to the reign of William III, who engaged a syndicate of City traders and merchants to offer for sale an issue of government debt, which evolved into the Bank of England. In 1815, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, British government debt reached a peak of £1 billion (that was more than 200% of GDP). At the beginning of the 20th century the national debt had been gradually reduced to around 30 percent of GDP. However, during World War I the British
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