Some things are worth worrying about, but others perhaps not so much as the coronavirus crisis deepens.

The humongous increase in public borrowing necessitated by the crisis, though obviously not a path any government would choose to inflict on itself, very much falls into the latter category.

As a general rule of thumb, public debt will soar in wartime, and then fall back again in peacetime. At least in its fiscal consequences, the Covid-19 pandemic should be viewed as very much like a war.

To ensure that permanent damage to the supply side of the economy is kept to a minimum, the Government is being forced to act as insurer of last resort, underwriting private sector wages for the duration of the crisis and bailing out companies brought to the brink by the economy’s sudden stop.

The Chancellor has said that he will borrow this money, but as some economic commentators have argued, would it not make more sense, given the unprecedented nature of the crisis, for him to get the central bank to print it instead, thereby supposedly protecting the public purse from the costs of the mitigating policies now being pursued?

Exponents of such an approach call it “People’s QE”, or as originally conceived by the economist Milton Friedman, “helicopter money”. In his classic paper on the optimum quantity of money, Friedman (1969) imagined a permanent monetary injection as an antidote to deficient demand accomplished by showering the economy with dollar bills from a helicopter.