Ouch! The best case scenario is that the enforcement can continue but only if QBT file an entirely new or fundamentally altered claim; all of which would extend the process by many months.

Q : If you can print fiat why do you as a Government need to borrow?A. To kick the can twice as far, twice as quickly. If it is going to be your problem in two years, such tactics can make it someone else's in four.

That is absolutely toe curling. A former chair of the United States Council of Economic Advisers no less!Surely this madness cannot go on for much longer.

Great summary Tom!!

If I miss a payment on one of my credit cards I get a penalty charge. I pay as soon as I realise that I have missed a payment and phone up. The penalty charge gets cancelled but not the interest charged. Clearly I am a good touch, can pay the debt and am a "good customer". Within a few weeks they increase my credit limit.If a country has no debt then it makes sense to issue fiat. But if in debt and you issue fiat the value of the outstanding debt is decreased in the eyes of the market and the interest rate on that outstanding debt is ramped up, and you devalue your fiat debt, interest rates go up.So issue fiat if your debt is "manageable" but if not you can only borrow more, just like the credit card companies.

Inflation control is the main reason. Printing money devalues your currency increasing inflation. Zimbabwe and Venezuela printed large amounts of their currency which created hyperinflation. Borrowing money via the bond market creates discipline, the market's trust in a government will determine the rates paid. On the downside, borrowing too much puts pressure on government to service the debt and potentially cut money from critical areas like education, health and defense.

The printing press leads here The Easy Money Fairy Tale Is About To End Violently says the world's second most foul mouthed financial podcaster » ShareProphets

The Government borrows the amount of goods and services that the currency represents. Only goods and services can pay for goods and services: a lender gives up the power to purchase a set amount of goods and services by lending to the Government and expects to receive the same amount of purchasing power back next year. Whether the power to purchase those goods and services are represented by sterling, dollars or glass beads, the principle is the same. Let's call them tokens.Tokens represent an amount of goods and services that everyone generally agrees upon at any one time. Because the supply of those tokens is generally increasing at a faster rate than the amount of available goods and services, we might expect those tokens to represent a lower amount of goods and services next year but we can't be certain and we can't be certain how much lower. That's inflation. The Government wants to pay for goods and services now for which it does not have sufficient tax revenues, so it asks private individuals to lend it tokens in order that it can pay for stuff right now instead of raising tax. The Government agrees to return those tokens at a later date with a few more tokens added to compensate for inflation. That's Government borrowing. It so happens that the Government has a monopoly on making and issuing those tokens. It can never run out of those tokens. As an alternative to borrowing tokens that it already issued, it could just create more tokens and hope no one notices. But people do notice and we get inflation.* Those tokens will represent a lower amount of goods and services and people will expect them to represent an even lower amount next year. We get more inflation. The Government still needs to pay for the same amount of goods and services that those tokens represent today. That hasn't changed. But if it just prints instead of borrows, the tokens become worth less. Remember, only goods and services can pay for goods and services, so we would need more and more tokens to represent the same amount of goods and services next year. That's inflation (again!). The Government could tax its population more and thereby reduce the amount of tokens in order to stop inflation. However, this has political and economic consequences that go far beyond simply controlling inflation. In order to avoid the political consequences of hiking taxes and the economic consequences of inflation, the Government must borrow (or reduce spending!). *Something for the pedants: I should note that Government borrowing borrowing is itself inflationary because it brings forward spending by moving existing purchasing power from savers to the government; however, printing adds new purchasing power on top of what's already there so is much more inflationary.

A fiat-issuing government does not borrow because it needs your money; it borrows to protect the value of the money it has already created

Appointing PKF Littlejohn, auditors for all sorts of scallywags, is never a positive move.