DOUG Clark (Letters, March 25) rightly points out the threat posed to all of us by the current banking system in that the creation of a cashless society reliant on plastic cards will prevent the private individual from accumulating savings outwith banks. The next step will be to withdraw cash money so there will be no point in stashing fivers away in a biscuit tin under the bed as no retailers will accept them. Banks will have succeeded in gaining complete control of money as a commodity.

We already have a situation where the pound in our pocket is simply a voucher of variable value that, in the community, can be exchanged for goods and services but which the banks will not exchange for anything other than more pieces of paper. We also are in the position that the National Debt is approaching £2 trillion yet cumulatively only £70 billion in hard cash has ever been minted by the Government and was theoretically in circulation in 2016 so almost all of the National Debt can only be “invented money” created by the banking system out of interest payments on debt.

A new style of pound coin is being introduced to counter the vast number of fakes in the general circulation. What is conveniently forgotten is that independent surveys suggest that three per cent of all pound coins are counterfeit and that banks have been found issuing them to customers rather than removing them from the circulation and accepting the financial loss. The illegal drug trade in the UK generates about £10bn a year, a significant portion of which must be recycled through the banking system else it would disappear from circulation ergo there have to be conduits, as in the proven case of HSBC and Mexican drug cartel money, where the profits of crime are legitimised.

Mr Clark rightly highlights that the banks rather than the Government controls the creation of “new money” and it does so in essence by lending money it doesn’t actually have on the strength that it will be repaid with interest, the only source of this interest being the banks themselves. Banks are money-making machines controlled by a few individuals. The corollary to the fractional lending process that allows banks to lend more than they have in reserve is that only about two per cent of sterling ever created actually exists as hard cash; the rest is figures written in bank ledgers and computer files and if we all demanded that our next monthly salary was paid to us in cash, the rotten house of cards would crash.

David J Crawford,

Flat 3/3, 131 Shuna Street,

Glasgow.

PINSTRIPE goes on at some length telling us why Scotland would be the only country in the world that would be unable to run its own economy (“Public would pay a high price for independence”, The Herald, March 27).

He writes: “The underlying problem is the large annual deficit which Scotland runs.”

I am astonished that nowhere in his article does he mention the UK’s net debt of £1.7 trillion and rising.

It is even more surprising that he had room to highlight Iceland’s five per cent interest rate but seems unaware that Denmark (a small independent country of some five million people without the natural resources of Scotland) has announced that it is free from all foreign debt.

David Hay,

12 Victoria Park,

Minard.

I NOTE from your report (“Property tax leaves £100m hole in Scotland’s finances”, The Herald, March 25) that the replacement of stamp duty with the Land and Buildings Transaction Tax (LBTT) has left a hole in Scotland’s public finances. I understand that the main reason for this is the drop in property sales in the 10 per cent tax band between £325,000 and £750,000.

If there has to be a property sales tax, why not graduated it in much more equitable stages?

For instance, it could be levied at increasing percentages in £50,000 stages up to £1 million starting with houses sold for above £150,000.

Such a structure could easily be tailored to bring in at least as much revenue as the present failed system. It would also discourage the strategic bunch-pricing of houses just below the existing trigger points of £325,000 (five per cent leaps to 10 per cent) and £750,000 (10 per cent jumps to 12 per cent).

As it stands, LBTT is being seen as just as discriminatory against aspiring house buyers as the council tax is against those whose homes place them in the upper reaches of the council tax banding system.

Or, could the LBTT and council tax bands have been devised as part of some Machiavellian plot to force cash-pressed owners of high council tax-banded properties to sell in a depressed market to generate lucrative sales of homes in the higher LBTT bands to boost government revenue in those bands?

Robert Dickson,

Thurcot,

Sornbeg,

Galston.