Hello and welcome to Slate Money, the regional episode of our weekly podcast, guiding you through the important business and finance news of the week.

I'm Felix Salmon of Fusion in New York, but I am a proud graduate of Glasgow University, and we are going to be talking about

Scotland this week and whether it will become independent. Would that be an economic disaster?

We will also talk about the possible unintended consequences of a new federal banking regulation.

Will it hurt infrastructure investment?

And we will do a podcasty look at my interactive game up on fusion.net about lifetime earnings and the benefits of going to college.

And finally, we will do our usual numbers round.

Let me introduce a regular guest.

We have Kathy O'Neill, head of the Leeds Program for Data Journalism at Columbia University.

What's your number, Kathy?

Hi, Felix.

My number is one-fourth.

And Jordan Weissman, Slate's Moneybox columnist, how are you feeling on the numbers front?

I'm feeling well, and I'm feeling like my number's going to be 349.

I think I know what that is.

My number is $12 billion.

And with that, we are going to hand it over to Jordan Weissman to tell us everything we need to know in 30 seconds or less about Scotland.

So next week, Scotland will be going to the polls to vote on an independence referendum. They are considering breaking free, seceding from Great Britain and going alone for the

first time in 307 years. There are economics involved here. There's cultural resentment. There's so

much to talk about. And it's up in the air. We don't really know. The polls are neck and neck. They're

tight. There's a real chance this will happen. I think it's kind of crazy. But I'm curious to hear from Felix, his take, considering he actually lived there for four years and has a little bit more insight than I would about the mentality of the Scotsman. And one of the things is that I've been reading and reading and reading about Scotland this week in preparation for the show, but I can't get it why they want to do it. It's all about the ripple effects.

What will this mean for Northern Ireland?

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