If you want to see financial Armageddon in all of its savagery, forget Wall Street, London or even Reykjavik, and go instead to Edinburgh. The Scottish capital, home to both collapsed RBS and HBOS, is at the heart of the disaster that has overtaken British banking, and will never again be the dynamic wealth-creating centre that enabled it to dominate the UK banking business.
Edinburgh was the financial hub that funded the Scottish industrial revolution in the 19th century, full of thrifty, shrewd businessmen – “canny” was the word they applied to themselves – and when Scottish heavy industry went bad in the 20th century, it reinvented itself as the centre of what we now call the “financial services industry”.
It is a mirror of the great disaster that has overtaken global finance, and a role model for how not to run a financial system.
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