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He left the RBS in 1987. He's also not the personification of Independence.
He is the personification of the Scottish government's repeated selective use of the most favourable of a range of scenarios in forecasts for Scottish investment, tax take and broad growth, and dismissal of the central consensus forecasts. Where could he have learned that?
the RBS is no more 'Scottish' than Barclays is English.
Incidentally, not true. RBS corporate remains heavily staffed with Scots and remains HQd in Scotland, neither the case with Barclays.
The USA had to bail out Barclays to the tune of something like 5 billion ...
Not true. The US had to bail out insurer AIG. AIG used some of that money to pay money owed on financial insurance products to Barclays. Barclays was 'bailed out' by middle eastern investors mainly the Qatari sovereign wealth fund which later sold at a profit. You can't cite non-evidence like Barclays (crooked as they are) to make RBS look normal.
The chief economist at Deutsche Bank, David Folkerts-Landau, that so conveniently supported Cameron by saying voting for independence “would go down in history as a political and economic mistake” as large as those which sparked the Great Depression of the1930s, is in charge of the same Deutsche Bank which made a loss of 1.153billion euros in the last four months of 2013 ...
Folkerts-Landau knows plenty about taking crazy risks, but one crazy risk he is not involved in is leading a bid to take Scotland into independence.
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rw101
He left the RBS in 1987. He's also not the personification of Independence. He's the leader of a political party that promotes independence and can be voted out a matter of months after the referendum if people so choose to do so. This is a basic concept of democracy.
Try again.
Aside from that the RBS is no more 'Scottish' than Barclays is English. Both are multinational commercial banks that maybe used to be 'National' banks in some kind of sense, but floated themselves on the stock markets, have international trading arms, took over foreign banks... The USA had to bail out Barclays to the tune of something like 5 billion, for example this doesn't make it an 'American' bank. Even if it is headquartered in Edinburgh, RBS's trading happens on the FTSE, for the benefit of private shareholders, not the Scottish nation. If there is any direct benefit to Scotland over the wider UK it is in the jobs such institutions provide for the offices based here, nothing more.
The RBS has been 'nationalised' in the sense the treasury owns an 80% stake in the bank. Since then, it's been penalised hundreds of millions for breaking Libor rules and caught deliberately withholding credit to viable UK companies to allow them to sell off their assets at profit, which speaks of UK corporate culture and Westminster's reluctance to regulate more than anything else.
The chief economist at Deutsche Bank, David Folkerts-Landau, that so conveniently supported Cameron by saying voting for independence “would go down in history as a political and economic mistake” as large as those which sparked the Great Depression of the1930s, is in charge of the same Deutsche Bank which made a loss of 1.153billion euros in the last four months of 2013, where roughly half of that loss came from legal fees in America where the bank was forced to pay fines of 1.4billion euros for selling dodgy financial products. In December last year, Deutsche Bank was fined £578million by the European Commission for fiddling the Libor rate, and last month, the London branch of Deutsche Bank was fined £4.7million by UK regulators for financial irregularities in 29million separate transactions (reduced by 30% for admitting impropriety)...
So, it's not a 'Scottish' issue, it's a global issue of corporate governance and light touch regulation.