SNP Win - The Economics of D-I-V-O-R-C-E

purch

One piece of good news.

We could ban all talk of Scottish houseprices, on this English forum :T

chewmylegoff

p.s. even if their economy is in surplus, it would presumably cost billions of pounds to actually separate the two countries, and logically they should bear all of those costs themselves, which would destroy any benefit of doing so for ages, just in time for the oil to run out. i guess when it did they'd want back in...

one benefit would be that there would have to be two MSE house prices boards, so we wouldn't have to be lectured about aberdeen anymore.

Generali

chewmylegoff wrote: »

I've seen some interesting stats on the scottish economy, prepared for the purpose of demonstrating that devolution was the holy grail. They showed that if you include the oil revenue on the basis of geographical location of the oil fields (which seems fairly reasonable), that the scottish economy is currently in surplus.

In the small print, however, they noted that they had excluded all of the banking bailout costs because that was an "english" problem.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/jeremywarner/100010146/scotland-would-be-as-bust-as-iceland-if-it-had-been-independent/

Well maybe, but the fact of the matter is that had Scotland been independent when Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS, both Scottish registered banks, went under, it would now be more bust that even Ireland and Iceland. As a likely member of the euro, there would also be no obvious path back to salvation. Assuming he had not already been defenestrated in the manner of Brian Cowen, Mr Salmond would by now be begging Westminster to restore the union.


Do the maths. It has cost the UK taxpayer £70bn to recapitalise the Scottish banks – this was no UK banking crisis, but a Scottish one – and the sums needed would undoubtedly have been a great deal larger had not taxpayers from the UK as a whole been standing behind the liabilities. Shared among a population of little more than half the size of London, that’s £14,000 per head.

I have no idea whether this is true or not BTW.

lemonjelly

purch wrote: »

One piece of good news.

We could ban all talk of Scottish houseprices, on this English forum :T

:D:D

In addition, the oil is next to worthless, as it is about to run out. Ad told me...:cool:

ninky_2

Generali wrote: »

The SNP doesn't want nuclear weapons.

.

countries with oil reserves and no nukes don't have a good track record of late. unless they are happy to do very favourable deals for those countries who do have the nukes of course.

chewmylegoff

great minds, purch.

tomterm8

I don't think it's true. Of course, scotland would have retail banks, but multinationals like RBoS and HBoS would not have been based in scotland, because on its own it doesn't have the infrastructure. They would want to be in one of the top world financial capitals. There is no way Scotland could back a bank like HBoS.

Generali

IronWolf wrote: »

I honestly dont think it will ever happen, the Scottish people don;t want it

The last referendum was framed such that a majority of those eligible to vote had to vote in favour for Scotland to leave the Union. The majority that voted, voted in favour of independence. I doubt the SNP would be looking for anything other than a simple majority of voters.

Generali

tomterm8 wrote: »

I don't think it's true. Of course, scotland would have retail banks, but multinationals like RBoS and HBoS would not have been based in scotland, because on its own it doesn't have the infrastructure. They would want to be in one of the top world financial capitals. There is no way Scotland could back a bank like HBoS.

Switzerland can't back banks like UBS yet they exist. Iceland had banks that were strongly recommended on this very website that had liabilities far greater than Iceland's GDP.

chewmylegoff

tomterm8 wrote: »

I don't think it's true. Of course, scotland would have retail banks, but multinationals like RBoS and HBoS would not have been based in scotland, because on its own it doesn't have the infrastructure. They would want to be in one of the top world financial capitals. There is no way Scotland could back a bank like HBoS.

i agree that had scotland been independent of england all along, it's unlikely that RBS and HBOS would look like they do today. quite apart from anything else, the H bit of HBOS probably wouldn't be there.

i think, however, that the example of iceland demonstrates that it's not at all impossible that an independent scotland would have had some horrible banking liabilities to deal with. it's a given that scottish banks would have gambling operations in the city, passported in under EU rules.