Well, that's one way of getting your house in order and starting off the new year prudently. I was surprised to read on Saturday that this past week, Britain made its final repayments to the US and Canada for its Second World War-era loans (see "Sixty years on, we finally pay for the war"). I thought those loans had been paid decades ago. The financing related to matériel supplied under the Lend-Lease Agreement for the war effort itself, as well as massive loans made after the war to pay for the reconstruction of Britain.
I remember learning about the American Lend-Lease programme as an undergraduate, but in typical Canadian fashion, I never learned that our government loaned so much money to the European allies after the war. Canada apparently loaned $1.2 billion US to Britain - even with the low rate of interest (2%), over 56 years the repayment totalled just over $2 billion US.
That's a staggering amount of money - and the fact that Canada and the US were in a financial position to loan so much is a sobering illustration of how the mightiest continent in history was brought to its knees by that war.
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