IT was heartening to read Richard Murphy’s piece on the imperative for an independent Scotland to have its own currency (True independence for Scotland must mean leaving the Bank of England behind, Jul 18).
Since reading The Deficit Myth by renowned American economist Stephanie Kelton I’d worried that this wasn’t a widely held view here, so would urge greater minds than mine to familiarise themselves with it so that we don’t fall in the trap of a “gradual independence”.
READ MORE: Richard Murphy: True independence means leaving the Bank of England behind
Basically, the theory is that a country who issues its own currency cannot run out of it, it just prints more. What matters instead is that Scotland would need sound fiscal governance to avoid inflationary pressures.
Were we to rely on the Bank of England after independence we would soon fall to the same grief as Greece did in the eurozone, because Greece had given up control of its currency and got bullied by the bigger beasts. For that reason I no longer think that the Tory debacle of Brexit is perhaps so disastrous for Scotland ... maybe we were lucky?
Lionel Beale
Glasgow
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