The SNP manifesto includes strong commitments to investment in thew Scottish economy, including via the Green Investment Bank and a Scottish Development Bank.
What intrigues me is this comment:
[W]e will continue to maximise investment in our nation's infrastructure, using both capital spending, new borrowing powers and a range of innovative finance mechanisms.
Are they talking about green quantitative easing when they refer to 'innovative finance mechanisms'?
I know they do know about it. The phrase is that used by the Bank of England to refer to quantitative easing. It would be very good if they were. It's an issue needing a champion and its impact on Scotland could be significant.
But let's ignore the rest of the UK: the impact in every constituency of this whole country of the adoption of green quantitative easing would obvious. There would be new jobs, higher wages, increased economic activity, new demand, a stimulus for local business, the creation of new enterprises and hope.
And all made possible by using the quantitative easing process to help the people of this country and not just its finance community, as was the case when £375 billion of quantitative easing funds were created from 2009 to 2012.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Lets hope so.
It might not be QE but the so-called Scottish Futures Trust or some variant of it. I’m not saying this of you Richard but I’m finding most of the comment on Scotland in the rest of the UK is significantly ignorant of what actually occurs here (obviously so in relation to the Parliament) and where the debates are at. I think but I’m not completely sure that some or most Scots used to get annoyed at being completely ignored by MSM but now the problem is too much attention built on ignorance. One example is the higher public spending here. This is never pulled apart and analysed. It seems higher spending according to the MSM equals free this and free that but this was never the debate here. Free prescriptions were introduced because the old system was so dysfunctional and made no financial sense. It was just easier to make them free and accept a few negative consequences. There is also a significant query over defence spending, some of which is indeed allocated here but is not spent here. Again they say public spending is higher here but no-one can see the results…many services are still poor, the road are awful just as they are in the rest of the UK and so on. Getting a bit ranty so I’d better stop!
I think you’re right
Allocating defence spending has always been deeply arbitrary