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踢館：蘇格蘭獨立會拖垮蘇格蘭經濟？ (英文)

* 轉自同學的臉書，原文有上鎖。

https://www.facebook.com/keith.miller.5811/posts/4393728058480

Keith Miller:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/08/opinion/paul-krugman-scots-what-the-heck.html?_r=0

oh god I'm going to have to talk about Krugman now..

central bank in the uk was made independent in 1997, this point is crucial. the fact is that if we vote yes monetary policy will continue to be conducted as it has been since 1997 - independently from Westminster by the MPC. it will be apolitical and will consider the british isles' economy as a whole - and no this will not be a disaster due to how interconnected and similar our two economies are. very little will change, the MPC will continue to consider the circumstances and make adjustments to the base interest rate and if needed alter the supply of money as needed. as for Krugman i've been studying this guy for over ten years now - look at almost any introductory economics textbook and his name is probably on there. Krugman claims that the euro crisis was caused by countries that shared a common currency yet didnt share a single cohesive government, and to an extent yes this played a role in making the euro crisis much harder to tackle with effective, localised policies to address the issues in each respective country throughout the eurozone. however he is missing a huge contributing factor to the euro crisis; the fact that public sector spending and debt skyrocketed as a result of overly deregulated financial markets forcing countries such as Ireland to inject huge sums of money into banks that had to be quite honest been taking the piss in their search for profits. It was this that caused the euro crisis, not the lack of shared currency/government (of course Krugman fails to mention this given his implicit role in causing the global financial crisis in 2007 but that is another story). So will scotland and the UK share the same fate as the eurozone? will an independent scotland be like spain like this guy is suggesting? I really don't think so given how similar the UK and Scotland's economies are. The thing that really limited effective policy action in europe was that there were such diverse economies linked under a single currency union - greece found itself sharing monetary policy with germany and ireland for example. But that is simply not the case for the UK where our economies are pretty much symbiotic in nature.

as for "running out of money" and being able to "bail out its banks if necessary"... simply consider how much money was injected into RBS and other british banks by the US federal reserve... the fact is that these financial institutions are truly globalised, and it is not up their country of origin to ensure they stay afloat. as a result you have barclays receiving £552bn from the rederal reserve

source: http://www.businessforscotland.co.uk/bizforscotland-destroys-the-no-campaigns-bank-bail-out-lies/

Jamie Hume:
It's kind of a funny article, because although Krugman is as credible as it gets, I don't see what we have in common with Spain, whatsoever? If we exclude oil revenue our GDP per capita is basically the UK average and if we do include it (and you might as well, it's as much a part of GDP as any other sector) we're conspicuously better off. The real victims of the Euro area are less productive countries in Southern Europe who joined at too high an exchange rate and couldn't compete with richer Northern Europe. So why are we like Spain? A bursting property bubble can obviously crash a country's financial sector, but there's less evidence of a property bubble here than the UK as a whole - if anything going independent reduces the prospects of a bursting property bubble. The second argument is that we wouldn't be able to recapitalise banks if their assets were too large a share of our GDP, true as well, for any country. But the best way of preventing a collapse is stronger regulation which UK policy makers have shown little appetite for. Independence would give us more control over our own financial sector to mitigate those risks, which don't seem to be any more pressing for us than somewhere else anyway? Currency union isn't ideal and has real downsides but in the short term it's the most stable way of making a difficult transition more straightforward.

Keith Miller:
I lost my respect for krugman many years ago he is a free market ideologue who continues to constrain the discipline of economics from progressing beyond the neoclassical bullshit that he insists on preaching to undergraduates and policy makers alike