The past few days must have given the country’s monetary and fiscal authorities much to think about. It all began with the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) finally putting a number on how much the rupee’s steep fall has inflated the public debt, which incidentally came out on the same day that the rupee dropped to its lowest level against the dollar in about a year. That also led to the rupee officially becoming the worst performing currency in Asia, barely six months after it became the best performer in the whole world. It turns out that devaluation alone, not more debt, added Rs2.9 trillion, which amounts to an increase of 20 percent, to the public debt over the last three years. And even that’s not the worst part. This calculation is based on the exchange rate of Rs157.3 to the dollar. And since the local currency has lost 10 more percent of its value since the calculation, the impact of which has not yet been included in the total debt, the final numbers are sure to send shivers down the spines of a lot of people in the finance ministry and the central bank. It has also been revealed, by the central bank itself, that the addition of about Rs15 trillion to the public debt in just three years is equal to 82 percent of the gross public debt that the last previous two elected governments of PPP and PML-N added in 10 years. And total public debt increased by 60 percent from July 2018 to June 2021, which means an unsustainable 20 percent jump every year. True to form, PTI has laid the blame of all this as well on the previous PML-N government. If former finance minister Ishaq Dar hadn’t kept the rupee artificially more or less pegged to 100 to the dollar then the subsequent free float of the currency wouldn’t have resulted in inflation, high interest rates, etc, PTI says. But the fact is that the SBP governor, for some reason known only to himself, chose to keep the interest rate at the awkwardly high level of 13.25 even when core inflation was around seven percent and refused to lower it despite hue and cry from all over even though the only purpose it served was increasing the cost of annual debt servicing from Rs1.5 trillion at the end of the PML-N government all the way to Rs2.7 trillion. These figures, released by the government itself and its own central bank, fly in the face of official claims that the debt burden has been reduced because of financial prudence exercised by the present administration. Hopefully they will also shake the government out of its slumber and force the central bank to arrest the slide of the rupee. *