No one who knows Sir Mervyn King would describe him as a radical. The Bank of England governor looks every inch the owlish academic, yet he is midway through what is possibly the greatest gamble in Britain’s economic history. Under the frosted-glass term of ‘quantitative easing’, he may soon have the Bank artificially create £600
Bill Jamieson wonders how badly ‘Brand Scotland’, with its associations of canniness and caution, has been damaged by the financial crisis and a dismal Scottish Prime Minister Scotland’s fortitude has certainly been tested these past 12 months. Its proud claim to have a special excellence in finance — an innate canniness and caution — has
Number 35, St Andrew Square in the heart of Edinburgh’s New Town has no name plate or corporate signage. It is an anonymous executive office used by Sir Fred Goodwin, Royal Bank of Scotland’s now-departing chief executive, for discreet meetings away from the bank’s out-of-town campus headquarters at Gogarburn. From its elegant Georgian first- floor
Bill Jamieson says calls for a Rooseveltian New Deal to stave off US recession are misinformed; it was FDR’s much-maligned predecessor who set the course for recovery A year into the credit crunch and the world’s leading economies seem locked in a macabre race to be first over the recession line. America, a few months
