Though not in the way most people expect

Though not in the way most people expect.There is not going to be an almighty crash, with hundreds of thousands of people being bankrupted and families being thrown into the street The market may slow, but lending will not stop. It is nearly 10 times the worth of Britain’s largest company, BP And it would buy you 25,000 Wayne Rooneys. One trillion pounds is a lot of money by anybody’s standards It is equal to the total GDP of the UK. And it would buy you 25,000 Wayne Rooneys.
It is also the amount of money British households owe to their banks.

It is an astonishing total which has politicians, economists and the Governor of the Bank of England fretting.But for the lenders, it has been the engine of one of the most successful periods of profitability in British banking history. Of these, around a third were used to research new treatments for diseases such as cancer, another third were part of general research for the benefit of humans and animals, and just under a third were gene-based experiments. Only 5 per cent were used to test the safety of non-medical items such as food and chemicals for industry.The number of animals used in experiments has almost halved in the past 25 years. But there is no doubt that this number can be cut further and the suffering of laboratory animals minimised. The DTI and Home Office have set up the National Three R Centre to look at ways of reducing vivisection, replacing it with computer-based modulations and screening, and refining animal experiments to reduce suffering.. Losing exports from drugs companies would have a huge impact on the UK’s current global trade deficit of £4.6bn, weakening sterling and stoking inflation.The Home Office estimates that in 2002, almost 2.75 million scientific experiments involving animals were carried out.

The trade balance would widen by up to £11bn, although this figure would be much higher today because the industry has since grown and more of its exports would have to be replaced to balance the books. The economic benefits it lists includes the “spillover” from R&D helping universities, the NHS and other industries. For example, in addition to the 5,000 registered project licence holders (scientists allowed to carry out experiments on animals), 15,000 people are employed to look after the animals themselves. The task force concludes that “a complete and instant reallocation of its resources to another industry would lead to less income for the UK”.If the UK pharmaceutical industry did not exist, according to the task force’s analysis for 1998, exports of £5.9bn and production for domestic use of £5.2bn would be lost.