The bank born from a bribe

RBS was set up with money paid to persuade Scotland to enter a union with England after its Central American empire-building scheme failed.

I spent the very early hours of yesterday morning broadcasting from Edinburgh's tram depot* with Five Live's Wake Up To Money (you can listen to the programme here).

We talked about the size of Scotland's banking sector (12 times the Scottish economy) and the dangers that brings (Iceland's was under nine times before the crisis). We talked about the brilliance of the fund management sector up here (managing around £600bn and rising) and about what might happen to it if there is a yes' vote.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.