Congratulations to all candidates standing, raising many points of concern.<\/p>\n
However none have alluded to Shetland\u2019s finances\u00a0or questioned why people could continue to live there.<\/p>\n
First to consider\u00a0is Shetland\u2019s place in the world, her strengths and weaknesses, governed by money budgets, and resources such as fish, oil, gas, energy.<\/p>\n
Since\u00a0WW2 the Bretton Woods System has served the world well but now creaks at the seams.<\/p>\n
The USA fiscal and external deficits have been mainly\u00a0funded by Japanese surpluses buying US Treasuries (aka IOUs) but after years stagnation they have begun to repatriate\u00a0funds to stimulate its own economy. Canada, China and others are likely to follow that trend obliging the US Treasury to further raise interest rates to support the US Dollar, and more so since the start of the Iranian conflict.<\/p>\n
Why does that matter to Shetland?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the ripple\u00a0effect \u2013 UK Gilts\/bonds normally trade about 0.5% above American Treasury rates, which in turn raises\u00a0further the increased range and costs (of the interest rates) of Westminster, Holyrood and local authorities\u2019 budgets.<\/p>\n
The continual downward pressure on local authority budgets is evidence of that, and the SIC\u2019s persistent\u00a0yearly need to drawdown from its \u201coil acquired funds\u201d is in effect a\u00a0prerequisite by Holyrood.<\/p>\n
Scotland imposes an effective \u201ctax\u201d on Shetland to balance the books \u2013 demanded by The Accounts Commission \u2013\u00a0and all the result of truncated funding from Holyrood.<\/p>\n
Why put up with it?<\/p>\n
Into this morass steps Mr Swinney, with \u201csolutions\u201d, whilst conveniently forgetting that Scotland already runs a twelve per cent deficit in comparison to the UK\u2019s of six percent.<\/p>\n
More recently the First Minister proposed issuing Scottish Bonds (Gilts aka \u201cKilts\u201d) after the election, ostensibly to fund infrastructure, promoted as having the same risk factor to\u00a0investors a UK Gilts.<\/p>\n
The coupon (the interest rate) on the bond could (maybe?) be the same as UK Gilts, but buyers and traders on the secondary market (also lacking liquidity) now or in an independent Scotland could see the value fall to say below 90%\u00a0 to account for the additional risk factors, arriving at interest rates well over ten percent.<\/p>\n
Recession depression permanent austerity courtesy of Mr Swinney\u2019s Party\u2019s economic plans.<\/p>\n
If tunnels\/ferries\/hospitals\/schools were financed via those methods the bonds would be subject to attack by hedge funds \u201cshortening\u201d them to the serious financial disadvantage of the ordinary punter in Shetland and ravage the SIC\u2019s finances.<\/p>\n
Shetland shouldn\u2019t need to continually draw from its reserves to subsidise Holyrood\u2019s budgets to spend elsewhere. They were never established\u00a0for that purpose.<\/p>\n
Should Shetland instead decide to borrow,\u00a0why do so through Holyrood, whose brokers would demand from Shetland the much higher interest rates, but instead borrow directly from the Bank of England\/UK Treasury\u2019s Office of Debt Management?<\/p>\n
Voters should take it all into consideration before casting their ballots \u2013 both for the first preference candidate and the regional list of hopefuls.<\/p>\n
No amount of internet posts, manifestos, brochures, banners, flim-flam, marches, propaganda or wishful thinking can alter the basic economics referred to above.
Cecil Robertson
Inverness<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Congratulations to all candidates standing, raising many points of concern. However none have alluded to Shetland\u2019s finances\u00a0or questioned…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":491518,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[47816,84,1294,25273,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-491517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-47816","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-election","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=491517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491517\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/491518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}