Fallout from the dramatic collapse of HBOS last week will ultimately outlast the disappointment of a few thousand shareholders. 

The shotgun merger has given the conspiracy theorists enough milage to carry them through to St Andrews Day.

After whisky and golf, money and medicine are what Scotland is famous for and to lose your global reputation for one of these cornerstones overnight will have serious long term repercussions. Globally Scots have always punched above their weight in the field of finance.

But it’s unlikely this news will see the Queen queuing up, pass book in hand, to switch accounts according to the more paranoid elements on the country's nationalist wing.  For them the whole crisis last week had nothing to do with the strength of Scotland’s financial services sector and everything to do with proving a point to these upstart Nats.  

According to some in Holyrood’s political village, Gordon Brown wasn’t in the slightest bit interested in bailing out HBOS with government funds aka Northern Rock. He saw its demise as an opportunity to remind those thinking of separation, just how vulnerable a tiny nation like Scotland could be to the vagaries of the global economy. If the Bank of England with billions in reserve couldn’t do anything, what could an independent Scotland have done? 

Some on the more fanciful wing of the ntionalist party take it a step further. HBOS was actually sent to the wall with the full backing of the UK government. This would ruin Scotland’s reputation as the UK’s second biggest finance centre and in doing so scupper all international confidence in the nation’s ability to run its own financial affairs in the future. What better way to reinforce financial impotence than letting one of the country’s oldest institutions go to the wall? 

However entertaining these theories are, the likelihood is that the UK government could not afford to bail out HBOS. 

HBOS may, in a previous life, have funded Wellington’s defeat of Napoleon but it met its own Waterloo against a room full of striped shirts. 

If the government set a further precedence with an open ended bailout, the ‘spivs’ and their short selling techniques would have been salivating at the prospect of their next victim. Full in the knowledge that another attempted market correction would make them tens of millions.  

This merger may not have pleased all, but it seems to have stemmed the bleeding, it may take longer for Scotland’s battered international reputation to heal.  

September 23