Could an independent Scotland have afforded our contribution? The answer is absolutely yes, according to the Harvard professor and international banking expert Andrew Hughes-Hallet, who said “the cost of Scotland’s contribution to the bank bail out as an independent country would have been roughly the same as it was as part of the UK – roughly 10%”. Although we absolutely know this wouldn’t have been the case, even if we’d been left with the full bill of £65bn, we could have afforded it. Scotland after all has bailed the UK out to the tune of £89bn in the last 19 years alone. Had Scotland been an independent nation, we would have enjoyed a surplus of £68bn over the last 19 years. Instead we bailed the UK out to the tune of £83bn. That is our contribution to UK national debt interest that an independent Scotland would not have paid. And all of this ignores the question of whether a regulatory system with direct Scottish influence would have allowed RBS and HBOS to over-leverage their balance sheets or that Halifax is actually in Yorkshire! An Excerpt from Business for Scotlands Note on Bank Bail Out.
Posted on: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 00:33:13 +0000
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