End May Links

# "If you want r to get under g and stay there, inflation and financial-repression is a big part of the picture. And for this to be of any use, it has to be proper inflation – i.e. the sort that includes wages." Inflate! says A Fistful of Euros

# "in an economy that operates on prices, as ours ... clearly does, the economic quantity of consumption is not tethered to the physical quantity of resources people consume. ... Think about it: how can economic growth be “bad” and recessions, with all the cutbacks they entail, not be “good”? ... replacing a capital stock built up over decades in response to insanely low fossil fuel prices with one that runs sustainably is going to require a lot of economic activity—you know, GDP" EconoSpeak Finally Can’t Take Naomi Klein Any More

# Adam Ramsay's series again on reasons to support independence: The flotilla effect and why smaller countries are richer

# Martin Wolf doesn't sit on the fence: Wipe out rentiers with cheap money

# Western Antarctic ice sheet collapse has already begun, scientists warn. And so it begins...

# I'm a bit wary of endorsing this post from Business for Scotland, but properly qualified they are on to something. Why Quantitative Easing has been bad for Scotland could be read as an indictment of QE as a whole, but Scotland needed an extreme monetary policy response to the financial crisis, in common with the whole of the Western world. However the post should be read as making the (correct) point that this particular form of loose money meant that the distributional benefits were towards those with large financial holdings - and this resulted in geographical imbalances. If new money had been created and distributed on an equal per capita basis then we could have had the required loose money policy without favouring the already wealthy, and implicitly the South East of England at the expense of the rest of the UK.

# Lev Ratnovski, Luc Laeven, & Hui Tong ask Are banks too large? in VoxEU