Standing on the Bund in Shanghai, for instance, watching the river cargo hurry to market, and looking across to the gleaming Pudong business district.

I've been stuck in the congestion of call centre workers in Bangalore, and marvelled at the scale of business education in the suburbs of Delhi, where eager young Indians skill up to take on the world.

Another such place is Kendall Square in Cambridge. It's the subway stop for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, just before the Red Line crosses the Charles River to Boston.

In the spring sunshine, earnest post-exam students are discussing their summer internships. Professors stroll purposefully, fulfilling the stereotypes of overgrown moustaches and supersized bow-ties.

Around it you can find high rise office blocks bearing the names of the technology giants. But look closer and you can see numerous small technology companies, from software to pharmaceuticals, crowding for space with venture capital firms.

I've come to this part of the US to find out more about the ecology of America's start-up culture, and its links into Scottish technology. You can hear more soon, on the Business Scotland programme on BBC Radio Scotland.

Business in the bricks

To offer a small preview, the good news for Scotland is that it seems to be doing many of the things that are done here to create the environment for a thriving technology sector. And Scottish universities already have world-class strengths in science and technology.

Americans have told me how much trade and investment agencies at UK and Scottish level are keen networkers, and both MIT and nearby Babson College host Scotland's best entrepreneurial prospects on intensive executive courses.

The less good news is that others are also learning the same lessons, and between Massachusetts and Silicon Valley in California, America has both the financial clout and the innovative momentum to keep its lead.

The numbers are awesome. As I learned from the Edward Roberts, 50 years an MIT-man and professor of entrepreneurship at MIT's Sloan School of Management.

His study of the economic impact of MIT points to more than 25,000 active companies founded by living MIT alumni. They employ more than three million people, with turnover of more than $2 trillion (more than £1,300bn).

If the MIT community were a country, he reckons it would be the world's 11th biggest.

Then look at the impact on the state of Massachusetts itself. It's got a population of around five million - the same as Scotland. This one university (and of course, it's not alone - Harvard is just up river) can take credit for creating firms that represent around a quarter of the state's private sector.

Companies with roots in MIT skills turnover $164bn (£105m).

Those numbers are getting a bit elderly, despite a couple of updates on the 2006 baseline.

Professor Roberts is about to launch a new survey of alumni, confident that the pace of entrepreneurial activity by MIT graduates has picked up pace, and that it should give the evidence to ensure MIT's arch-rival in California, Stanford, is put clearly in its place.

I haven't been the only visitor to MIT this week asking how this has happened. David Cameron swung by ahead of me, eager to find out what UK plc can learn.

The secret, says Roberts, is in the culture of the place, as if in the bricks of the building. For 150 years, MIT has been about learning and doing, and for more than 100 years, its faculty members were spinning out their technology into companies.

I've been hearing from one lawyer who specialises in the tech sector, who represents at least 25 members of MIT faculty. They don't all get rich, but some do - one of them sold on his business, providing routing via enhanced internet algorithms, for $4bn.

It's helped by having such a strong success rate that it can have the pick of go-getting students from America and around the world. And Roberts' research shows those from overseas are even more entrepreneurial than American classmates, not only in creating companies when they return home, but even more effective in setting up and growing companies in the Massachusetts area.

It also helps that the disciplines of science and technology live cheek-by-jowl with entrepreneurs. This is a place where innovators in both technology and science can collaborate on future products, at the MIT Media Lab, where the Prime Minister called in on Wednesday.

It doesn't have much to do with media in a conventional sense, but it is addressing many of the big challenges of future life, for instance in congested urban living, where it is developing a driverless car that you can arrange to collect you. It may also be able to fold itself up into a fifth of the usual parking space.

And for those facing limited living space, the Media Lab is developing a one room apartments which transform themselves between the functions of different rooms in a bigger home.

Incidentally, this drive towards sharing space and resources rather than owning and controlling them, this seems to be a theme worth watching: while New York prepares to get its version of the rental bikes already found in central London or Paris, the Boston Globe reported on Thursday on a car rental scheme in which you drop off your car at Logan Airport as you depart.

To save on parking fees and to earn some income from it, an agency will hire it out for someone else to drive. If they fail to find a match, the parking's still free.

The other part of the MIT ecology that's a big advantage to Massachusetts is its well-developed funding markets. To find out more, I took a local insider's advice, and went for breakfast at a small, traditional diner on the quaint main street of the suburb of Weston, just outside Boston's ring road, Route 128.

That road gave its name to Boston's technology cluster, at least 50 years ago. The quality of life brought tech firms out to the leafy suburbs around it, like Waltham and Weston.

Ye Olde Cottage diner - established in 1952, with nothing much changed since then, while claiming 'Number 1 Red Sox fan' status - is the place to find the deals being done, over easy with hash browns and an endless supply of coffee from the wise-cracking Dawn Rodowicz.

John Landry was meeting one of the 40 entrepreneurs in whom he's invested. He got into software in the early 1970s, when it was in its infancy. When he told his father, a banker, Clancy Sr asked what on earth he knew about women's lingerie.

Since then, he's been chief technology officer in ten start-up companies, and subsequently sold them all on. At one point, it made him the tech boss at the dominant business software provider, Lotus, before it, too, was sold on.

That process of creating and selling on leaves the Boston area with a challenge familiar to Scots - it lacks the big corporate headquarters. They're more often to be found in Silicon Valley.

And John Landry observes an interesting new phenomenon in the development of tech firms' ecology. The global giants of Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Twitter are no longer prowling around in a search for the next big thing, paying top dollar for ideas and the people behind them.

They are headed by tech geeks and entrepreneurs who want to develop those ideas in-house, making their own companies as innovative as possible. That's what drove Google to launch its own music streaming business this week, rather than buying up the existing market leaders, Pandora or Spotify.

Rather than waiting to be bought, that means the minnows have to look to "build a business", points out Landry. That means finding an income stream.

Rather than wait for the ideas to come to him, this serial investor is creating another company. Using his own software coding skills, he has developed a new product for curating what you find on the internet. Inspired by his own search for recipes and gardening tips, it launches at the end of June.

As he told his wife over dinner this week, the difference between doing it now and 40 years ago is that he has time to have dinner with his wife.

It's no longer necessary, at his level, to get stressed by the process of starting up. Relaxing at Ye Olde Cottage, the latest of America's boundless frontiers, he reckons that it's now possible to create a small family firm with global impact.

But at least one small team of Scottish researchers may be getting close to something significant.

They are developing and trialling a drug that may yet prove to increase the life of an elderly patient with acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) - a condition for which the most recent new treatment was approved 44 years ago.

If it does so, by turning the cancer cells behaviour back on themselves, there could be applications far beyond that.

There are only nine in the research team, working in Dundee for a company called Cyclacel. In the 1990s, it spun out from the Dundee University work led by Sir David Lane, finding a gene common to more than half of people who suffer from cancer. He's since departed for a rather more attractive research post in Singapore.

The other nine employees of the company are in a 'corporate park' of impressive office blocks set amid original woodland and manicured lawns a short drive from New York.

While visiting the US, I've just visited them to learn more from president and chief executive Spiro Rombotis. He spent 10 years living in Dundee, building up the company.

But he had to get much closer to the specialists in life science investment within Wall Street's big financial firms.

Nowhere in Europe is there that expertise or the liquidity of life science capital markets to sustain the kind of investment that Cyclacel needs if it's to get through the hugely demanding and hugely expensive process of satisfying America's pharmaceutical regulator, the Food and Drug Administration.

This week, Spiro Rombotis updated investors with news of further progress with the trials. The latest findings indicate that a person aged over 75 with AML may live 9.4 months, while using the drug sapacitabine, whereas those without it live on average for only 3.4 months. They are both harsh figures, but such is the measurement of progress in drug development.

The staggering bit of this business - at least for anyone who's not in it - is the cost. The first quarter results from Cyclacel, issued this week, showed that losses have gone up slightly, to $3m, or £2m.

By most business standards, that doesn't look good. But in this line of work, that's to be expected. In 2012, there was revenue of only $112,000, but a loss (the measure applicable to shareholders) of $19m (£12.6m).

The annual report looks back to August 1996, with the inception of Cyclacel. It shows that the firm has received research grants making up revenue of $6.8m over 16 years. But in that same time, it's sustained losses totalling nearly $313m. That's more than £200m.

So this requires committed investors, who know what they're doing. It's reckoned that the average drug costs around $1bn to bring to market, and the attrition rate is colossal.

According to Spiro Rombotis: "This is a marathon - you have to be patient, persistent and also extremely humble to take on such a huge challenge."

The chance of success? "Before we enter pre-clinical investigation, less than one in 100. Once we enter clinical trials, maybe 10%. After we got to phase two, 40%. And in phase 3: 60%".

With Cyclacel now a third of the way through the third phase, you can expect to hear more from Mr Rombotis on BBC Radio Scotland's Business Scotland programme later this month.

But that preview provides a bit of context for a big controversy relating to the news, published in the New York Times on Tuesday, that the actress Angelina Jolie has opted to have a double mastectomy, without having been diagnosed with breast cancer.

A test showed that she carries the same genetic sequence that led to her mother's early death. Whereas most people have a sequence called BRCA1, which helps to suppress tumours, some people are born with a faulty version of it, so tumours go unchecked. That condition gave Ms Jolie (her doctors told her) an 87% chance of contracting the same cancer by the age of 70. It's also believed to lead to a 44% chance of ovarian cancer.

The actress was encouraging other women facing the same predicament to face up to it, and she has been widely praised for doing so. One reckoning is that around 7% of breast cancers are related to the BRCA1 mutation, or the similar BRCA2.

The controversy is that the test costs more than £2,000, and that's because the BRCA1 genetic sequence was discovered by, and is owned by, Myriad Genetics. This is a molecular diagnostics firm, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, with a monopoly of the testing and the ability to put constraints on further research into the sequence.

As Cyclacel has also recently found, this is an expensively litigious business in an expensively litigious country. Myriad is being sued by a group representing academic researchers, claiming it cannot be right that genetic sequences can be owned as intellectual property.

How can you own something which is naturally occurring, and protect it for your own commercial interest, goes one side of the argument? But without intellectual property rights, goes the industry, such research won't be done and cures won't be developed.

The US Supreme Court is due to rule on that later this year, with huge implications for the development of genetically-based personalised medicine.

In the meantime, the Angelina Jolie publicity was not only good for the health of women facing the same genetic condition. It was good for business: Myriad's stock price in New York rose by 4%.

More often than not, they have a prepared line to take, and fear thinking out loud for fear of how an original thought might affect those dreaded stakeholders, not least shareholders. For Gerald Ratner, they recall, it was all over in one sentence.

Ian Marchant is different. For 11 years atop SSE, he's been, by turns, amiably combative and unusually thoughtful. But he's rarely said much in public, either on-message or off.

However, with only a few weeks before he stands down, he sat down with me at the company's Perth training centre for the first long-format interview he's done.

He didn't shy from using the words "sorry" and "deeply ashamed" when we discussed the mis-selling scandal that has cost SSE dear, in a record fine and moreso in its reputation.

But the word he used most was "philosophical"; about his approach to what went wrong and how to address it, about the problem of overpaid top executives, and about the big challenges facing the energy market.

Later this year, after "decompressing", he's keen to move into a mixed portfolio of roles, none of them running a large company. He recalls having had a place in teacher training college, but trying out accountancy instead. And 30 years later, he wants to return to teaching, at university level, of business, the energy business in particular, and with his philosophical twist.

Marchant is well suited to the case study method of business teaching, starting with his own analysis of what went wrong at SSE: "fragile conversations" between sales staff and customers; a dispersed workforce; failing to realise how much expectations of corporate behaviour rose after the banking crash; the wrong incentives for staff, who trusted the sales staff to tell them what was really going on rather than what they thought managers wanted to hear; and meanwhile, warning signs went unheeded.

It's like working at height, he suggested; you fail to clip on, you fail to notice that safety rules have tightened, the bosses accept your assurance that all's well, and you fail to take action when you have a few minor slips. The result; fatality.

And, he asked me, how many other business foul-ups follow the same pattern? The BBC's Jimmy Savile nightmare, for instance?

In academe, Marchant could also be someone to make sense of the huge challenges facing the energy sector and government in charting a course through the next 10 or so years of making policy to ensure investment in the energy market.

Marchant points to three factors making it increasingly hard to keep the lights on: demand for electricity has fallen for an unprecedented four years, making it uneconomic to run power stations, so SSE has closed some; yet at the same time, power stations have to be shut down as they run out of carbon emitting licences; and with capacity sharply down as a result, there's a hiatus in building new plant while Whitehall delays a decision on the levels at which it's going to guarantee strike prices, or floor prices, for different types of generation.

That's apart from the tightness of capital, in the wake of the financial crisis.

In the meantime, as bills rise, energy companies continue to face the ire of customers.

Partly, that's down to the rising cost of generation, of transmission, of social tariffs and environmental levies. All are heading in one direction. The other half of energy costs - the fuel itself - is more likely than not also to remain on an upward trajectory.

Why is it, I asked, have the power firms meekly accepted the government's requirement to deliver Whitehall policy on the shift to lower carbon and renewable power, while funding energy efficiency measures, smart metering and the social tariffs that support poorer customers?

They're all worth having, replied Marchant, even if the social tariffs would be better delivered through the tax and benefit system.

But if the companies look like they've been patsies for taking on responsibility for some of the hottest of Whitehall policies, it's because they've failed to get their house sufficiently in order to resist.

I was fielding questions - mainly from London - about how the Scottish capital would handle the disaster for jobs, supplier companies and the self-confidence of the Scottish financial sector.

It's been an often painful process for everyone. Today, we're hearing of hundreds more jobs to go at Lloyds Banking Group. But the loss of financial jobs has been much harsher in London. And neither Edinburgh nor London nor New York nor Zurich have taken as big a reputational hit to their financials sectors as had been expected.

Although decision-making power at RBS, and even moreso at Lloyds/Bank of Scotland, has largely moved south, others have moved in and grown.

As a testament to Scottish financial sector skills, Edinburgh is now the headquarters to three new, standalone banks: Tesco, Virgin Money and, now, Sainsbury's.

Sainsbury's is taking a similar route to its supermarket rival. Tesco had a joint venture with RBS, which it bought out.

Sainsbury's this week announced it's spending £248m buying out the 50% share in Sainsbury's Bank held by Lloyds Banking Group (via Bank of Scotland) since it started 16 years ago. It's probably a good time to pick up low value bank assets, if you have the appetite for them.

Tesco Bank has found it a tough task to move beyond simple savings products to get into mortgages and on into current accounts.

That is going to become even more complex from September, when current account providers will have to provide an easy electronic switching service to customers, as one of the methods being required by government and regulators to encourage more competition.

Sainsbury's Bank has been less ambitious than Tesco, so far, but standalone status, wholly owned by the supermarket chain, may give it bigger targets.

That would certainly be welcomed by government. The Business Secretary, Vince Cable, was in Edinburgh last Thursday, at the grand headquarters of Royal Bank of Scotland.

This was to talk at a conference about another bank that's chosen Edinburgh for its financial sector skills; the Green Investment Bank.

It's a rather different beast, using £3bn of government funding to seek out low carbon investment opportunities where the market is reluctant to commit to risks. There was pressure for it to have the opportunity also to borrow on the capital markets, but the Treasury isn't allowing that until UK debt begins to come down. It had hoped that would be in 2015, but that schedule looks very unlikely now, so the Green Investment Bank may have to stay constrained for a few years longer.

For now, however, with its first five months showing £635m of investment committed to 11 projects worth a total of £2.3bn, it's busy enough with the taxpayer money at its disposal.

And the Scottish government has used the opportunity of the conference to press its case for funding of £500m of projects, including greener street lighting.

Meanwhile, the pressure to break up RBS is coming from various sources - even the Archbishop of Canterbury. With legislation being put in place for an 'electrified ring fence' within the big banks - cutting off risky investment funds from core household and business banking - Vince Cable has gone a bit quieter on his enthusiasm to see RBS ripped apart.

But along with recent talk, from RBS itself, about the time for a sell-off of at least the first tranche of the government's stake, perhaps at a loss, there are other options being considered. One, floated by Lib Dems, is a giveaway of shares to the public.

Another, I hear, is that the sale of government shares could be of bits of RBS, rather than simply tranches of the 81% shareholding. That could look similar to the sale of Direct Line insurance division, which has been required by the European Commission as a condition for RBS's state aid.

But a further division of RBS is unlikely to be rushed, at least until it has completed the complex offloading of 300-plus branches, being renamed Williams & Glyn's, which the commission also told it to shed.

The other approach to boosting competition in banking is to encourage banks that focus on Britain's nations and regions.

Clydesdale Bank, which operates in northern England as Yorkshire Bank, is this week marking 175 years of doing precisely that, aided by the recent re-opening of its central Glasgow headquarters.

But for all the talk four years ago of Clydesdale seeing out the downturn while its rivals in the Scottish market were hobbled, that hasn't worked out quite as expected either.

On Thursday in Melbourne, its owner, National Australia Bank, published six month figures that showed it's back in the black, but only by shedding a huge and very troubled commercial property loan book.

While Clydesdale reported a £54m profit (contrasing with a loss of £38m in the same October to March period last year), it had bad and doubtful debts of £91m (down from £191m).

Looking more closely at its parent bank's accounts, where those bad loans now sit, that toxic loan book required another write-off of £185m. Although an improvement on last year's equivalent figures within the Clydesdale accounts, that still reminds you that its exposure on commercial property has been a very painful one.

The result is a Clydesdale that's been through a lot of change and pain in recent months.

Morale is not good, as it has worked through 70% of the target 1400 jobs it announced last April it had to shed.

Much of that came from closing down two London offices, leaving only its Piccadilly branch, while it sharply cut the number of its business banking centres in England.

Clydesdale has gone back to basics, boosting its ratio of deposits to lending and expanding its mortgage lending rather faster than the industry as a whole.

And David Thorburn, as boss at Clydesdale, is setting his sights on rejuvenating the brand and its technology, with a £30m mobile banking platform, not least to appeal to a younger demographic of customers than Clydesdale currently has.

One interesting dimension of the problems he's faced is the chorus of criticism from Australia.

With a straight-talking chief executive and even blunter-talking financial commentators, National Australia Bank is seen as being badly damaged by being the only one of the country's big four lenders to have exposure to Europe.

Viewed from Melbourne, any such association with the continent's stalled economy, let alone UK or Scottish banking, is seen as a big black mark for investors Down Under.

"To watch the rate at which pounds, dollars, euros, Chinese renminbi and Korean won are being drilled into the North Sea and West of Shetland, you wouldn't think there's much concern about constitutional change.

"Investment in UK oil and gas reached a heady £11.4bn last year, and is on track for £13bn this year. These companies are used to working across international boundaries, and multiple tax regimes."

Who has a right to North Sea oil?

Prof Alex Kemp on the oil sector

Behind it is a projection of the oil price going as high as $270 per barrel, from the just over $100 it is trading at now.

What the report did not tell you was that it was the top end of a very wide spread of possible prices.

It assumes the top end of projections for oil still available for extraction. Most of that would be money going to multi-national owners of those reserves.

And the number tells you nothing about the impact on the rest of the economy from such an increase in fuel prices, both at home and in export markets. You can reasonably assume that it wouldn't be pretty.

But it helps focus minds on the energy bit of the independence debate.

The figure is drawn from the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development, on which I reported in March.

The reference is now included in one of several papers written for the David Hume Institute (DHI) in Edinburgh, which today holds a conference on the big issue of energy in an independent Scotland, from the point of view of oil and gas, of renewables, and of the consumer.

What runs through them all are wide variations of risk and return, revolving around a range of uncertainties, some of which are well established in the independence debate, some of which are new, and many of which gain from intelligent illumination.

As the authors of the 'Energy Trends: Scotland and the World', Julian Fennema, Mark Schaffer and Karen Turner, three economists at Heriot-Watt University, summarise it: "If world oil prices go up and stay high, or there are major new discoveries in Scotland, there will be a big payoff for an independent Scotland and a payoff for the UK as a whole if Scotland is still part of the Union; if there is a fall in oil prices, or little in the way of new discoveries, an independent Scotland absorbs the full downside, unlike the case where it is still part of the Union."

That much is sort of obvious, when you think about it. The questions on the energy question, which is never far from the economic part of the independence debate, are how you assess both risk and return, and how much appetite for risk - both downside and upside - Scottish voters will have when they vote in September next year.

Another of the DHI papers on oil and gas, written by John Paterson and Greg Gordon of Aberdeen University, underlines the uncertainties that the move to independence could introduce to a sensitive investment market.

To watch the rate at which pounds, dollars, euros, Chinese renminbi and Korean won are being drilled into the North Sea and West of Shetland, you wouldn't think there's much concern about constitutional change.

Investment in UK oil and gas reached a heady £11.4bn last year, and is on track for £13bn this year. These companies are used to working across international boundaries, and multiple tax regimes.

Indeed, it's worth a brief digression to underline the findings of the latest survey of Scotland's offshore services industry, published at the weekend by the Scottish government.

It found 2011 supply chain earnings hit £17.2bn, up 5.8%, and continuing 14 years of growth. Nearly half of that was in exports, up 8.4% to £8.2bn.

While selling to 106 different countries, the biggest market remained North America, but with Africa in a strongly-growing second place, and sales of expertise to the Middle East on the rise as well.

While investment in UK water is back in boom times, the offshore industry in and around Aberdeen appears to be doing exceptionally well at diversifying into foreign markets.

However, the authors of the DHI's academic paper say the independence debate is "an unwelcome note of uncertainty for the oil and gas industry", at a time when it thinks it has finally got an understanding in Whitehall of the need for tax and regulatory predictability.

It's not that independence would necessarily upset the applecart, as the Scottish government, headed by an oil economist, appears to be alert to the industry's need for consistency. But the academics offer some pointers to issues other than tax - notably including Scotland's maritime boundaries - that could leave uncertainty hanging in the air:

"International law provides procedures for resolving this issue rather than a clear answer," they write. "Negotiation could be protracted. Any reference to a dispute resolution mechanism could delay a final answer for years."

The authors suggest that joint development between Scotland and the rest of the UK could help to keep the industry's momentum during that time.

Messrs Paterson and Gordon also raise concerns that the transfer from Whitehall to Scotland of regulation, licensing, inspection and safety is a major undertaking, particularly in a mature region for oil and gas, with ageing equipment, hard-to-reach reserves and a looming boom in decommissioning.

And there's a warning to both London and Edinburgh politicians: while the public finances are in a lot of trouble, "The temptation to regard the industry as a cash-cow to meet short-term needs will be strong, but should be resisted".

Today's energy conference is also looking at the other side of a sector that holds strong prospects for the Scottish economy - in renewables.

Grant Allan, Peter McGregor and Kim Swales, of Strathclyde University, tackle the question of whether independence would help Scotland's big ambitions for green energy. Or could it hold them back?

This has been a sensitive one, since the pro-union campaign raised the prospect of huge increases in Scottish bills if Scots can no longer look to English, Welsh and Northern Irish bill-payers to share the cost of the subsidies necessary to incentivise wind farm developers.

The academics acknowledge that argument, though in less alarmist tones than the headlines.

They look at the obligation on all countries to use more green power, at the baseload supply for those times when the wind drops and waves subside, and at the choices that the rest of the UK (rUK) would face if there were a disruption down the line in Britain's integrated energy market.

With conventional thermal power stations already being switched off and lots more capacity soon to go, wind and marine turbines are seen as the future, and it makes sense to locate them where they can generate most efficiently.

That can often mean Scotland, which could continue to sell power to its southern neighbour, post-independence.

That would be helped by the current plans for better grid links between Scotland and England, even if these cables cross an international boundary.

"However, it is not entirely clear how a completely integrated market could be maintained under independence," say the Strathclyde economists. "Overall, it seems likely that security of supply will prove a greater challenge for Scotland as an independent nation than for Scotland as an integral part of the UK".

Just one of the problems is how to ensure baseload supply, for which Scotland could be forced to look south.

It's argued that it makes no sense for Scotland to provide all its own back-up to wind and marine power, particularly if it's also put a block on new nuclear plants.

The costs of building its own spare capacity would be "very substantial" and "extraordinarily inefficient".

The authors go on: "It is clear that an independent Scotland would likely have to depend, for periods at least, on imports of electricity or fuels from rUK and elsewhere to ensure security of supply."

They then point out that the rUK could be expected to prioritise its own need to keep the lights on, in times of shortage, leaving Scotland at the end of the line and at a disadvantage.

Behind that is the UK's binding European Union obligation to cut emissions. It can do that by buying into the Scottish government's ambitious targets, drawing green power from north of the Tweed with or without independence.

But if there's to be an independent Scotland, rUK could choose to fulfil those obligations by buying green power from Ireland or from the continent, or by building more turbines on its own turf and seabed. That would be a big problem for Scottish policy-makers, the academics conclude.

Independence offers up the opportunity to use different policy levers, they point out; to tax carbon emissions more heavily, for instance, or to use inward investment to accelerate the economic benefits of green energy.

But for each opportunity, a potential downside: "It seems likely that, in the long-run, there will be costs in the form of higher electricity charges for Scottish consumers relative to those in the rUK".

It's a provocative point at which the David Hume Institute can start its discussions. And it puts down a challenge to Alex Salmond, when he delivers a speech later this week on the past, present and future of renewable power in Scotland.

It's the question of what would happen to economic growth. Or to put a bit more simply: would Scotland be better or worse off if it were independent?

At least one serious survey suggested that could be the decisive factor for many voters. So could Scotland grow faster if it were a nimbler, smaller country? And allied to that: what extra hidden costs might there be, for instance in a premium interest rate for smaller countries' debts?

The Economic and Social Research Council is putting some of our finest minds on the case. It's spending at least £4m on researching Scotland's relationship with the United Kingdom, with or without independence.

And on Thursday at a conference in Edinburgh, it presented some of its work, and worked through some of the challenges, even though much of this remains work-in-progress.

An academic paper presented by Birmingham University economist Professor Peter Sinclair was unusually entertaining by the standards of the dismal science. And that's despite the sentence: "Logarithmic specifications work best, and help to deal with heteroskedasticity".

The essay at least pointed towards some answers to the key question. But frustratingly, as with so much of the debate, it could only point. Answers are elusive.

The prof had looked at countries that have been through a split, to see what happened to their growth rates afterwards. The initial findings from such precedents as Czechoslavakia, Yugoslavia and the USSR suggest there can be a very deep decline in economic output, at least in the short term, just as there can be a sharp rise in economic output in the longer term.

And the biggest recent example of two countries uniting - East and West Germany - points towards big costs and subdued growth.

But in every case he could find of countries splitting, there were so many other factors at play - notably the impact of ending central economic planning controls by Communist Party officials, and even moreso the impact of war - makes them all but meaningless as a guide to Scotland's possible futures.

So how about the question of the optimum size of country for economic growth? Is it true that small countries grow faster, or that size holds them back?

Or as Professor Sinclair put it: "Do too many cooks spoil the broth, or do many hands make light work?"

Well, the conference heard that Scotland's population of five million people would put it mid-table in the league of nations. So it may not even count as a small country, but as a median-sized one.

However, Prof Sinclair found it hard to conclude much more than that. He found average economic growth is a little bit higher for the smallest countries than it is for those slightly larger. Small countries include some very rich tax havens, oil-rich sheikhdoms and city hubs.

And, it was pointed out, that could be true of Shetland, or even prosperous enclaves within Scottish cities.

But as you get up to bigger countries still, growth picks up again, until you get to the very biggest countries, by which time it's slightly lower again.

Represented graphically, it's a saucer shape as you go up the size scale, followed by a hump as you get to the biggest countries. But there's not that much variation for either. It's a shallow saucer and a small hump.

So if that's any guide, Scots could be better off if split into council areas, or at least, some could. Or alternatively, Scotland could be better off than it is if it were part of a much bigger state than the UK.

But of course, it's not much of a guide. And the international context of this was spelled out bluntly - that growth rates in the UK, Scotland, much of Europe and much of what we used to consider 'the rich, or developed world' is facing a long period of subdued growth. That's not only as the debt burden unwinds, but as fast-growing nations succeed in winning work from us, and catch up on our income levels.

"Get used to 1% growth, if you're lucky - 1.5% ceiling," declared Prof Sinclair, of Scotland's post-referendum prospects. "That's it - in or out" (by which I think he meant '...of the UK').

What, then, about the international experience of the cost of borrowing? Stand by for an answer, with numbers attached.

The argument is that smaller countries can borrow, but there's a premium placed on the risk that it may be hard to offload sovereign bonds. That is, bonds issued by the UK and other large countries are regularly and easily traded, but that's not so for smaller countries, and the risk of finding it hard to find a buyer puts a premium on price.

The calculation leaves aside the lack of any credit history. Nor does it take into account the Scottish government's proposal that Scotland should use the pound, but at least majority control of its monetary policy should be in London. Credit rating agencies mark down countries in that position.

It finds that a sovereign Scotland would probably - once it starts to issue its own bonds, rather than honouring a share of the UK Treasury's recent bond issues - have to pay an extra 0.4% to 0.6% on its borrowing. "And if things went badly, possibly much more," argues Prof Sinclair.

Indeed, there may be little spread of risk between countries for much of the time, but there are spikes of spreads between different countries, as we've seen in the eurozone in the past four years. That's when things become very hard to manage.

So here's the crunch: what would 0.55% extra mean, on top of the 1.68% at which Treasury 10-year bonds were trading today?

If you assume Scotland taking on a £120bn share of UK debt projecting forward to 2016, then Professor Sinclair gives us the conclusion that it would build up to an additional cost of £111 per person per year, or £289 for the average family.

Among the conference's other significant insights: the tax base of an independent Scotland, or other small countries open to cross-border migration of income and assets, may have to focus ever more on items that can't be moved, such as buildings and land.

That might make you wonder: whatever happened to the idea of a local income tax replacing buildings-based council tax?

And the consensus of academics doing the talking, particularly in light of experience in Quebec, is that next year's referendum is not the end point of the debate, but the start of a negotiation as to what independence actually means.

There were sharp criticisms of the UK government for refusing to spell out its positions on how to handle Scotland and relations with the rest of the UK after a 'yes' vote. One contributor pointed out that the 'decide first, then negotiate' is starkly at odds with the Downing Street approach to reform on the European Union: 'negotiate everything first, and then decide'.

"This stance prohibits informed decision-making by an electorate desperate for clarity, and merits closer scrutiny," according to Dr Nicola McEwan, an ESRC fellow at Edinburgh University. "The 2015 General Election raises questions over who would be in government to oversee independence negotiations, but it doesn't prevent the UK parties from being challenged to make their positions clear."

You'll recall that George Osborne departed from that script last week, when he set out the negotiating stance of the rest of the UK on sharing the pound sterling as a post-independence currency, along with oversight and central banking by the Bank of England.

He may have been blustering, as Alex Salmond claimed, ahead of taking a very different approach after a 'yes' vote. But at least the Chancellor offered a reminder that Mr Salmond's negotiation team can expect to meet a formidable defence of the economic interests of the rest of the UK.

With that exception - its authenticity disputed - Whitehall is leaving much of the rest of its thinking deliberately vague. So the view from the ESRC conference was that the result of the vote may be merely a mandate to negotiate, and the strength or weakness of the result may contribute to shaping the outcome of those talks.

While both 'yes' and 'no' camps may want a definitive result to put an end to debate, those taking an impartial position as academic observers reckon that it may merely be the starting point for a new phase.

And he feels constrained in taking action on that - either through criminal or civil action - while the Crown Office investigation drags on.

If he's going after that, it shouldn't only be the former bosses at RBS who should be on their guard against a renewed humiliation.

The regulator has yet to follow up on the Banking Standards Commission with its own report into HBOS.

Cross-border banker bashing

The business secretary's mischief-making is clear from the recipient, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, advocate general in the Scotland Office and chief Scots law officer in the UK government.

Lord Wallace, the former Lib Dem deputy first minister, has nothing much to do with the investigation into possible criminal action against those who drove Royal Bank of Scotland over the edge of the precipice in 2008.

That role is down to the Lord Advocate and the Crown Office in Edinburgh, which fall under the oversight of the Scottish government.

So there's political pressure being exerted on another government, even though Vince Cable insists he's not trying to interfere with the process, or at least the outcome of the investigation.

He says this follows on public anger still being very much alive. It's been kept that way by parliament's recent Banking Standards Commission report.

And Mr Cable wants to be seen to be doing something about the unhappiness that there's been so little action against individuals for their roles in the downfall of the banks.

There's plenty humiliation been heaped upon Fred Goodwin, former RBS chief executive, but the only actual action has been the removal of his knighthood.

The man who ran the RBS investment bank for him, Johnny Cameron, has agreed not to put himself forward for any senior jobs in finance, for which regulatory clearance is required. But the regulator, formerly the Financial Services Authority, said it would accept that pledge without actually banning him from doing so.

Otherwise, it is only Peter Cummings who has been fined (£500,000), and that was for his role in reckless lending by the corporate division of Halifax Bank of Scotland.

What Vince Cable seems to have in mind is the possibility of using his department's power to ban individuals from being company directors - not only in senior financial jobs, but in any company.

And he feels constrained in taking action on that - either through criminal or civil action - while the Crown Office investigation drags on.

If he's going after that, it shouldn't only be the former bosses at RBS who should be on their guard against a renewed humiliation. The regulator has yet to follow up on the Banking Standards Commission with its own report into HBOS.

And the person with most to lose from this process is Andy Hornby, who was chief executive of HBOS when it had to be taken over. He's the youngest of the culprits, and has reinvented his career in charge of the train sets at Alliance Boots and, now, Coral the bookmakers.

There is, however, a further complication. It's not clear whether Scotland's Crown Office is going after RBS or HBOS only for what went wrong pre-crash.

It only confirmed it had an investigation under way last July - six months after it started - and only then because of the publicity when it was revealed that Barclays was being heavily fined for fixing the Libor inter-bank lending rate.

RBS was then, and remains now, in the frame for that fraudulent skewing of the lending rate.

So it may be that scandal that's taking up Crown Office time, possibly involving those in charge of RBS in more recent years - indeed, those in charge of it now.

So the choice of the pound, the euro or a new Scottish currency is of fundamental importance to the debate on Scottish independence.

It's also quite a complex one. But the clash of Treasury and Scottish government should help voters better understand what's at issue; the management of risk, the role of stability, the freedom to tax and spend, and the constraints that come from international pacts.

There is, amid this, a fundamental disagreement over who owns the pound sterling now, and the Bank of England.

The Scottish government says Scotland can expect to share such institutions, post-independence, having spent 300 years building them up within the UK.

But the UK Government takes the view that if Scotland votes to leave the UK, it can't expect to make demands of the UK's institutions.

It's hard to see how these views can be resolved, without either a lot of compromise or the help of the courts.

Take note - Read more on this story

One of the banknotes has been signed by the Royal Bank of Scotland's Stephen Hester: others by Lord Dennis Stevenson. These date back to 2007 when Bank of Scotland, which he then chaired, was splurging high risk loans around the economy like a game of financial paintball.

So these notes carry reminders of recent financial calamity. But how much do they carry the nation's identity? Put another way, how much does it matter to Scots that we have our own banknotes?

The campaign to keep Scotland within the UK is banking on it mattering quite a bit, judging by the spin on this morning's morsel from a forthcoming Treasury paper on currency questions surrounding independence.

It's claimed these are symbols of the "strength and flexibility of the union", and a hint that even if they are retained post-independence, they may become less convertible into readies signed off by the Bank of England's chief cashier.

The Treasury paper's got quite a build-up; speeches from Treasury Secretary Danny Alexander last Thursday, pro-union campaign chairman Alistair Darling on Friday, and with a George Osborne/Danny Alexander jointly-authored article running in the Sunday papers.

Publication is scheduled for Tuesday. It's being promoted as providing new analysis as firepower to sustain attacks on one of the fronts which we're told is playing most favourably for the 'Better Together' campaign.

The question of whether Scotland retains distinctive banknotes is largely a symbolic one, pointing to the possibility, and the irony, that Scotland could gain its independence, but at a price including the loss of Sir Walter Scott's coupon on a tenner.

There ought to be meatier arguments than that in the Treasury paper. It's the other parts of the price that will get the focus when we see the whole document.

And it will take the Treasury into the politically risky territory of imagining its own role after a 'Yes' vote. You can safely assume it's not going to sound particularly helpful or co-operative in negotiating a currency pact, or at least not without exacting some big concessions and compromises on flexibility around Scottish deficits, debt and borrowing from the Holyrood negotiating team.

You can also assume the SNP and pro-independence side will want to explain the reasons why the rest of the UK should want an independent Scotland inside the currency tent.

Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon argued last week that sterling "belongs to Scotland" as much as other parts of the UK, just as it is argues the Bank of England does, and that a currency union is merely "common sense".

She challenged the Treasury to negotiate ahead of time, saying it has refused to do so because it doesn't want to concede it's in Westminster's interests to do a currency deal. Yet in a way, the opening position of that negotiation is precisely what she's getting this week.

Both sides of the debate are hampered by divisions. The SNP has shifted from a strongly pro-euro argument to, at least as strongly, a pro-sterling one, and while it appears united around the newer position, there is privately expressed concern that this has left the party exposed to the kind of attacks it's getting this week.

It is also having its message weakened by former senior Nationalists, independent economists and its Scottish Green allies arguing that it should keep open the option of a separate Scottish currency. As I've argued before, there's a logic to that, but it's a very hard sell politically.

Meanwhile, the pro-union side faces divisions that will only intensify as the electoral cycle turns towards fighting the 2015 election.

It's not particularly helpful to the constitutional cause for Alistair Darling to be on Sky News at the weekend warning of the uncertain, unpredictable nature of Britain's current economic predicament.

And in attacking his successor's problems in getting either growth going or the deficit falling, Mr Darling added: "At the moment, nothing he (George Osborne) says has got much credibility".

The other front opening up in recent days is Labour's attempt to find an alternative offer it can put to referendum voters on what changes it might make to enhance devolved powers within the UK, particularly tax powers.

That stage had to come, and it's an important development in this debate. Just as the nationalist proposition can be put under pressure, it opens up the main pro-union party to counter-attacks on the technical complexities and compromises it faces within devolution. That's if Labour can agree on what it wants to do with devolved powers, and that's far from guaranteed.

And in case money runs tight for burgeoning legal bills, there's the possibility of getting funding through the money markets.

Forgive me if this seems a tad tedious - if, for instance, you think there's more to life than football - but it's a story that gets ever more eye-popping and surreal.

On Wednesday, we learned of a new way that Mr Whyte, the former chairman of the Ibrox club, can have a go at Charles Green, the man who led the purchase of club assets from administrators last year.

Worthington, a small company that has nothing much to do with beer, announced it is buying quarter of a clutch of companies under the umbrella of Law Financial Limited (LFL). Worthington has an option on buying the whole company, for a total £1m.

One of LFL's directors is Craig Whyte, while there is also a directorship residing with a Florida-based company, Gold Manson.

Craig Whyte has or had a 7% stake in Worthington. The company's pension fund put £2.9m into Rangers before it went into administration. This was described last year as being the subject of litigation, along with a statement that Craig Whyte had nothing to do with the investment decision or the running of Worthington.

But then, there was the appointment as a Worthington director of someone who appears to have worked for one of Mr Whyte's other companies (also in a lot of trouble), Merchant Capital.

Under LFL, we are told, are two companies that ought to be well known to those who have followed the Ibrox saga; Sevco 5088 and Sevco Scotland, set up by Charles Green as vehicles to buy Rangers assets.

The Worthington statement to the London Stock Exchange lets it be known that the confusion between these two companies is at the heart of a legal battle Craig Whyte believes he can pursue against the current Ibrox management.

Here's the crucial bit:

"The assets of Sevco 5088 Ltd include a claim, which has been independently reviewed by leading counsel who is also a deputy High Court judge, to all of the business and assets of RFC 2012 Plc which were purchased by Sevco 5088 Limited or Sevco Scotland Ltd from the administrators of RFC 2012 plc in June of 2012.

"Sevco Scotland Ltd was subsequently renamed The Rangers Football Club Limited and its share capital was acquired by Rangers International Football Club Plc, the shares of which are now traded on AIM (the Alternative Investment Market, in London).

"It is the position of Sevco 5088 Ltd that it is the rightful owner of the business and those assets. After examination of the evidence, leading counsel's advice is that there is a prima facie case to answer".

In other words, Craig Whyte thinks he's got ownership of both of the companies that may have controlled Rangers' assets when they were sold by the administrators last year.

Claiming to have documentary evidence that Charles Green signed up Craig Whyte to a Sevco directorship, Whyte disputes the right of Mr Green to transform Sevco Scotland into a new entity and to take away control of the club.

It looks like good news for the lawyers, at least. And how are they to be funded? That's where LFL's new owners come in, getting into the growing market of litigation funding - that is, raising risk capital with the prospect of a big share of eventual pay-outs.

For the non-lawyers among us, the statement holds out the prospect of 'Craig Whyte: the Movie', a stocking-filler book for a future Christmas at Ibrox, and, of course, a reality TV format.

LFL is to have assets transferred to it, "including the book, film and television rights to the two takeovers of The Rangers Football Club in 2011 and 2012 as it relates to Craig Whyte. It is intended that these rights will be commercialised in due course".

It's not clear if another company has the shoot-'em-up computer game rights, or the merchandising of Craig Whyte cuddly toys. That's for another day, and yet another twist in this tale.

By the way, shares in Rangers International Football Club (chief executive: Charles Green) were trading on Wednesday at 62 pence. That's 11% below the price at which they were sold to fans last December, and nearly one third below their January peak.

I'll leave others to ponder the irony of it, or perhaps the link to Margaret Thatcher's legacy. But if we look at this downturn, the most recent output and job figures are looking good.

The bigger surprise is in the growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), up by 0.5% in the fourth quarter of 2012.

That's the same quarter that UK GDP was falling by 0.3%, and when much of the survey data about business performance and confidence on both sides of the Tweed was very downbeat.

Scottish job figures were less surprising, but no less welcome. While the UK number seeking work between December and February was up by 70,000, it fell in Scotland by 11,000.

That takes the jobless rate to 7.3% in Scotland, but at UK level, it's at 7.9%.

Moreover, while the UK figure is rising above 2.5 million, the Scottish figure has fallen below the psychologically helpful 200,000 level for the first time since 2009.

Look at the reverse side of the employment coin, and you'll see Scotland was also doing the best of any nation or region in the UK, with the number of those in work rising by 39,000, to more than 2.5 million.

UK job creation, which has outstripped Scotland by a wide margin, seems to have stalled after a prolonged improvement, according to this latest data.

Even the weaker sectors in Scotland have seen some growth, including construction. And this morning, we got an unusually upbeat assessment of last month's business from the Scottish Retail Consortium.

So what's been going right for Scotland? As ever, the data isn't good enough to be sure. But it may help to see things in the longer perspective of last year.

The figures from the earlier parts of last year reflected a big lift to the UK economy that wasn't seen in Scotland - a lot of it possibly explained by the Olympics in London, and accompanying feel-good factor.

That effect may now be getting unwound, as the British economy otherwise stays flat. But not having enjoyed that boost mid-year, Scotland may be seeing a winter lift to catch up a bit with the UK position.

The data tells us that, over the whole of 2012, the UK and Scottish economies grew by the same amount: 0.4%. And there's still some catching up to do. Scotland's 2008-09 recession was not as deep as the UK's but it's recovered less quickly.

Where there is most growth is in energy, in offshore, to a lesser extent in renewables and in utilities. Scottish Power is saying it could create 2,500 more jobs, though it's angling for the regulator to give it fast-track approval for its grid upgrade plans if these jobs are to become a reality.

There are quirks in here. As the Centre for Public Policy for Regions has pointed out, the measure of output for the health sector suggests it's contributed to UK growth by 15.4% in five years, but only by 4.3% in Scotland. "The reasons for this growth differential are unknown," say the Glasgow economists.

Then there's our old chum, offshore oil and gas. It has seen a sharp decline in production in the past two years, despite a rise in investment. Due to an unexpected shutdown in major fields, it took 0.2% out of UK production in the final quarter of last year. Without that, the economic contraction would have been only 0.1%.

But because Scotland doesn't have offshore production added to its numbers, that effect isn't to be seen. Whitehall number-crunchers have calculated that if Scottish accounts did include the country's geographical share of offshore production, then the fourth quarter would have seen decline of 1.5% instead of a rise of 0.5%.

You can surely guess the political point they're making, about Scotland's relative vulnerability to volatility.

So is this a sign of confidence finally getting into the Scottish economy? Not if this is merely catching up on the poorer performance earlier last year.

Nor if the signals from the rest of the UK are so weak on output and jobs (the GDP figures for the first quarter of this year are due out next week). Scottish confidence requires confidence from its main markets, and the market south of the border is a very important one.

Nor is confidence likely to return if wage figures are any guide.

The December to February data suggests very weak wage growth. These cover the whole of the UK. And if you take out bonuses, it's the weakest since current records began in 2001. As it's lagging price inflation, that's a continued squeeze on household income.

With exports struggling, it's hard to sustain growth from a squeezed household sector.

But at least there is momentum growing behind five months of improving job figures, and it's in the right direction.

It reaches the "inescapable conclusion" that if he didn't lie to his business partners, then he was either "reckless" or "negligent" in failing to tell the truth.

We learned last week that the former Rangers chairman lost a court battle with Ticketus, in which he was judged to owe £17.7m.

This week, the whole judgement, written by one Master Marsh, has been made available. And for those interested in the Rangers saga, Ticketus LLP versus Craig Thomas Whyte is a fascinating legal read. For Mr CT Whyte, it's an uncomfortable one.

But then, it seems Craig Whyte isn't given to reading documents very carefully, at least if this legal encounter is any guide, so it may not bother him much.

To recap briefly, Ticketus supplied Craig Whyte with £27m with which to secure control of Rangers Football Club two years ago. It has since gone into administration and then into liquidation, while its assets (the club, training ground, brand and Ibrox stadium) have moved on to new ownership.

Following the company's collapse, Craig Whyte is being sued by Ticketus. That football finance firm's owner, Octopus Investments, has successfully argued it was not just any creditor of Rangers, but had personal and company guarantees from Craig Whyte himself.

That's why they were in court in February, leading to this judgement. Ticketus/Octopus was arguing for a fast-track procedure rather than a trial, pleading that the chances of Craig Whyte succeeding at trial are more fanciful than realistic.

That's the case they won, though Mr Whyte says he will appeal. He has to do so by next week.

This case hinges on whether he misled Ticketus into the financing deal, by failing to tell them that he had been disqualified as a company director for seven years.

The evidence is that Ticketus/Octopus sent him a 'director's questionnaire' asking him directly if he had been disqualified.

The answer came back the same day, in February 2011, with a firm 'no'. But it also had a covering note: "I have attached the questionnaire. I'm not near a scanner right now, so it's unsigned".

Indeed, he went on to argue that the form had been filled in by his solicitors. Last week's court ruling points out this was a bit odd, in that the solicitors were not in a position to sign off a document asking about his state of health or potential conflicts of interest, let alone his past disqualifications.

And as Mr Whyte had been specifically pointed to two questions about regulatory investigations and disqualification, it was stressed that these were important to answer. Moreover, the form said to answer all questions "truthfully and without omission", with the signature to be applied above a statement that the form was "true, complete and not misleading in any way".

Craig Whyte's defence goes on: the document was only a 'travelling' or rough draft. That is, when he said 'no' to the disqualification question, he meant it only in a rough sense.

And still further: Whyte argued it would be "absurd" to lie to Ticketus because they could easily check that he had been disqualified.

As the court ruling points out, there is no searchable public record of such a disqualification (you might well ask: 'why not?') so Ticketus had to rely on Craig Whyte telling the truth.

This wasn't a minor oversight. As BBC Scotland disclosed in October 2011, and as the court ruling spells out in detail, Craig Whyte was disqualified in 2000 for an unusually long time.

In 1998, he settled for £150,000 when accused of "misfeasance, breach of duty and negligence".

The same year, Whyte faced disqualification proceedings in which he was accused of "misapplication of the assets of two companies to the detriment of their creditors".

But there's more. This court ruling uncovers even more bizarre pleadings from the former Rangers chairman.

He argued that he didn't know he was dealing with a company called Ticketus, but only with Octopus. This is despite an email being sent to him, which, the ruling points out, appeared to have an attached document referring to Ticketus some 22 times.

He argued that Octopus/Ticketus had agreed to help him recover control of Rangers, in the event that it went into administration.

He says this was verbally agreed at a meeting. Octopus/Ticketus replied no such meeting took place. In turn, Whyte offered no evidence that it did.

And then the astonishing bit - Craig Whyte sought to counter-sue on the grounds that:

"He had lost the opportunity to profit from control of Rangers";

"He had suffered foreseeable reputational harm";

"And the rescue and retention of control of Rangers would have enhanced his reputation".

Stripped down, that means he was claiming it was Ticketus, and not Craig Whyte or, indeed, HMRC, that was to blame for him losing control of the club.

And that cost him dear. "It is widely understood," argued Mr Whyte's lawyer, "that the acquisition of a football club is a 'vanity purchase' by wealthy businessmen" - and therefore the loss of reputation through the failure of that football club ought to be recoverable.

Most bizarre of all, he seems to think that by collapsing Rangers and then picking up the pieces, his reputation would have been higher.

Maybe the appeals process will find a judge who agrees with Craig Whyte. But the judge in this fast-tracking procedure dismissed the counter-suit, found no evidence that Craig Whyte had been denied evidence he said he needed from Ticketus, and didn't hold out much hope for Craig Whyte's chance of success.

While he awarded £17.7m to Ticketus, the ruling points out that the company is going after a whole lot more - £27.1m in claim and costs, and a further £18.2m in damages.

Even if Ticketus can identify and recover £17.7m from Craig Whyte's complex financial web, it seems that the company may be back for a lot more.

Well, the political intention is clear: to kill off the notion that Scotland is incapable of paying its way.

That used to be an argument often made against Scottish independence, often helped by citing, in isolation, the higher spending per head on Scottish public services.

It's only heard these days from those who have failed to keep up with the debate.

The SNP's latest publication, 'Scotland's Balance Sheet', provides campaigning ammunition pointing to Scots paying more in tax and spending less, as a share of the economy as a whole, on services such as pensions and welfare.

Well, the political intention is clear: to kill off the notion that Scotland is incapable of paying its way.

That used to be an argument often made against Scottish independence, often helped by citing, in isolation, the higher spending per head on Scottish public services.

It's only heard these days from those who have failed to keep up with the debate.

The SNP's latest publication, 'Scotland's Balance Sheet', provides campaigning ammunition pointing to Scots paying more in tax and spending less, as a share of the economy as a whole, on services such as pensions and welfare.

These were released before we were allowed to see the whole report.

But it has now been released, focussing on the five years from 2007-08 to 2011-12.

This was a period when the UK public accounts were in their worst ever shape, and when oil and gas revenues make Scotland's fiscal position look particularly healthy.

Along with full publication, we're also getting the argument that an independent Scotland could expect to inherit public sector debt at a lower level than the UK as a whole, when measured as a share of the nation's economic output - £92bn equates to 62% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP, the main measure of national output) compared with the UK's 72%, or £1,100bn.

If you put a particularly positive spin on it (from a nationalist position, that is), it even argues that Scotland could get back the benefit of the oil and gas taxation that went to the Treasury over the past 30 years.

That would take Scotland's debt, in 2011-12, down to 38% of GDP, while the UK's figure was heading towards 80% while the deficit remains stubbornly high.

What 'Scotland's Balance Sheet' doesn't mention is the argument you can expect to come back from the Treasury: that if Scotland wants credited with all that oil and gas revenue, it can also expect to be saddled with the debt from higher spending per head from which it has benefited over the past 30 years.

In 2011-12, Scottish government figures show that the average Scot had £12,134 of spending, compared with £10,937, a difference of £1,197. Or to put it a bit more simply, for every £100 spent on UK public services, Scotland got an extra £10.90.

For more on balancing the outlook on tax revenue with that on spending, you could do a lot worse than read the analysis by Professor Brian Ashcroft, of Strathclyde University's Fraser of Allander Institute.

That higher spending has been justified by higher need and cost, as Scotland has more poverty, a less healthy population and it's more rural, with those long country roads to maintain and smaller schools to staff.

But the unspoken reality is that higher spending has also been the Treasury's way of recognising the contribution from offshore oil and gas from under Scottish waters.

This has been accounted for as coming from the 'UK Continental Shelf' to avoid allocating it to any part of onshore UK.

But as Professor Ashcroft graphically shows, higher public spending in Scotland has quite closely tracked higher tax take from Scottish oil - at least after the oil boom years of the 1980s when Scotland could have been running large surpluses.

This focus on what an independent Scotland could have had from oil and gas revenue is becoming all the more important to the economic debate about Scotland's future.

And to return to St Andrew's House's figures in Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (GERS), you can see how important oil and gas would be to Scotland's economy.

Without offshore oil and gas, Scotland would have had GDP of £125bn in 2011-12.

Put in a population share of its benefit to the UK as a whole, and you get to £127bn.

But if the oil and gas under Scottish waters were all attributed to the Scottish economy, GDP would be £151bn.

To put it another way, one sixth of the Scottish economy would be in its offshore oil and gas fields.

Now, that's a huge resource, and it's rightly pointed out that countries with oil are unlikely to wish they could do without it.

But is it really Britain's now, or could it really be Scotland's in future? And is it really Gross Domestic Product?

The tax revenue from production accrues to the Treasury and could accrue to an independent Scotland's finance ministry (It's worth noting that no-one is disputing that an independent Scotland could expect to have control of most of the UK's fields).

But the profits don't come to the UK Treasury or a Scottish one. They go to owners of that asset, and the vast majority of them are shareholders outside Scotland.

So despite the big figures for GDP and claims of being the sixth richest country in the world, an independent Scotland would see a huge outflow from its economy.

Similarly, Ireland sees a big outflow of profits from the many multi-national inward investors there, which is why Gross National Product (GNP, which includes inflows and outflows of profits) is seen as a more relevant figure to guide its economic thinking.

By contrast, the UK sees profits going abroad from oil and gas assets in its waters, but it also sees a vast inflow of profits from British investments overseas, which is one of the reasons Britain is able to live with persistent trade imbalances.

Another statistical health warning about these figures; GERS is based on a lot of estimates. In statistico-speak, the 30-year analysis of tax take is 'experimental'.

It's relatively easy to identify how much is spent on devolved services, pensions and benefits. It's more open to dispute how much Scotland benefits from reserved spending on defence and the Foreign Office.

But it's much more difficult to identify how much is raised in taxes from Scotland, beyond tax on fixed assets such as house sales.

And everyone looks to Professor Alex Kemp, the offshore oil guru of Aberdeen University, to tell us where the value and taxation lies offshore, when at least one maritime border is open to dispute. Let's hope he's getting it right.

In short, GERS is the statisticians' best guess, or rather, a lot of best guesses.

And a final observation. Nicola Sturgeon, the deputy first minister, tells us that these figures put Scotland in "a strong position in these negotiations" on independence.

Then she says it again: "What share of UK debt Scotland takes with independence will be one of the crucial areas of negotiation between the Scottish government and the UK government, and Scotland will be in a strong position".

Surely Ms Sturgeon has learned from her time in politics that thinking you've got a strong argument is not the same as having a strong negotiating position?

Fred Goodwin was singled out for vilification over his role at Royal Bank of Scotland, and the head of HBOS business lending, Peter Cummings, was alone in being fined.

But there's been little use of the regulator's power to withhold "fit and proper person" approval for those in senior financial positions, nor the business department's power to ban people as company directors.

We have yet to see prosecutions for manipulation of the Libor inter-bank lending rates.

And there has been nervousness about unpicking pension deals, due to contractual obligations. (Be careful what you wish for - if that contract law is compromised, the implications could be unwelcome for other pensioners and pension savers.)

"Sir" James Crosby - to use the title he wants to give up - wants to be proactive rather than waiting for his punishment.

He's ceased to be an adviser to a private equity firm, and given up a directorship at Compass catering group, while also giving up his cancer charity role. And although he's giving up 30% of his HBOS pension, that still looks like leaving him on £400,000 per year. So he's hardly likely to find himself worrying about the squeeze on welfare benefits.

It appears to be unprecedented that someone should ask to be stripped of a title. Less prestigious honours have been given up in protest at government policy, including those awarded to the Beatles.

The only record of a knighthood being given up was Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore in 1919. He was protesting at the British army's massacre of defenceless protesters in Amritsar that year.

Whether or not Whitehall's honours re-scrutiny committee gives him his wish, Crosby can simply change his letter-heading. Meanwhile, his gambit may serve only to put more pressure on others named by the Banking Commission, and on the new regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, to respond to the calls for individuals to take responsibility.

Andy Hornby succeeded Crosby as chief executive. He was on the bridge when the HBOS ship hit the rocks, and was judged to be "unable or unwilling to change course".

Yet with little pause for reflection, his reward has been a very lucrative continuing career, first as chief executive of Alliance Boots, the chemists' chain, and now in charge at Gala Coral, the leisure and bookmaker chain.

He doesn't have a title to lose, but he may be wary of threats to bar people as company directors.

Lord Stevenson of Coddenham was chairman of HBOS throughout its eight-year life. He was described by the Commission as one of those remaining "deluded" about the bank's responsibility for its fate.

As Dennis Stevenson, he was given a knighthood in 1997, which could be put through the honours committee with powers to remove it.

But removing the title he actually uses, along with his seat in the House of Lords, is near impossible unless there's a change in the law.

It sometimes feels now that the 1980s could not have happened without her. Even while living through the decade, it felt like she defined the times.

If you loathed her, everything you disliked could be blamed on "Thatcher's Britain". If you loved her, nothing could have been achieved without her; to hear the praise for her international role, you'd think the Soviet Union would still be going if it hadn't been for the Iron Lady.

Neither side is right. The 1980s would have come and gone without Margaret Thatcher. The question is what difference she made. Or to put it another way, how would other politicians have shaped or reacted to the trends that were already under way, and pressures already building.

For historians, the game of "what if?" is a dangerous one. Not being a historian, I'll give it a try anyway, at least on the state of the economy, and the economy of the state.

The economic pressures building by 1979 were of persistently high inflation. Much of industry was bad shape - a lot of it in the public sector and loss-making. And trade unions exerted a lot of power.

Whoever you blame for what had become known internationally in the 1970s as the "British disease", it needed a cure. It's simplistic to say that meant taming inflation and slaying the unions, as there was a problem also of poor quality British management.

Margaret Thatcher's biographer and devotee, Charles Moore, has argued today that, although she became known as a hugely divisive figure, she was not the instigator of division: Britain was already divided.

The biggest gear change in public spending had already been forced on the British government after 1976, when the Labour Government was forced to go to the International Monetary Fund to seek support. The IMF imposed tough conditions on public spending, which contributed to strife in industrial relations and within the Labour Party.

That's why, without Margaret Thatcher, it's a fair bet that another Tory leader would have led the party to victory in 1979. If it were the man she ousted, Edward Heath, or the man she beat in the leadership contest, Willie Whitelaw, it would probably have been a 'wetter' or One Nation Tory approach to change - less radical and seeking to go with the grain.

It's unlikely that another Tory would have been so forthright in forcing the pace, leading the Conservative Party from its radical right, and taking on dragons to slay, as a test of political virility.

Nevertheless, a Tory government under different leadership would surely have sought trade union reform, and continued with Labour's toughened approach on spending.

It would have been informed by the sense of failure that came out of the Heath government of 1970-74, when there had been a U-turn and effective defeat at the hands of the National Union of Mineworkers.

That failure was the catalyst for internal challenge from the right, led by ideologues including Keith Joseph, and which put Margaret Thatcher into the leadership. So even without her in Downing Street, a new leader would have been challenged from the right to show similar backbone.

Would a different Conservative government have sought to sell off the many nationalised industries; steel, coal, shipbuilding, telecoms, gas, electricity, car manufacturing, much of the defence sector, later rail as well?

That is where many of the most divisive and painful decisions were felt, where communities that had been built around industries were exposed to the free market. In the coalfields, the steel towns and around the former shipyards; that's where the legacy remains painful a generation after Margaret Thatcher left office.

So would another prime minister have sought to reform these more gently within state ownership? The "what if?" question requires you to judge whether the Tories would have won a second term without Thatcher at the helm - a second term during which the privatisation agenda took root? And that, in turn, requires you to imagine that the Labour Party was electable in 1983.

After all, it wasn't Thatcher's doing that Labour's manifesto that year was known, by its own side, as "the longest suicide note in history", or that the splits gave rise to the Social Democrat Party, or that Argentina's General Galtieri offered himself up as another dragon for slaying, following his invasion of the Falklands.

There were big elements of Margaret Thatcher's political luck. The same factors might have kept another Tory leader in office, or a lack of resolve might not.

It's less clear that privatisation would have been pursued with anything like the vigour of Margaret Thatcher, as she "rolled back the frontiers of the state". In that, she led the world in a process that would quickly become a central condition imposed on other countries by the IMF and World Bank. It would later be embraced by the new nations of the collapsing Soviet bloc.

The pain inflicted on industrial communities - not least in Scotland - was not all down to the choices she made. At least as significant a factor was the high value of sterling in the early 1980s.

The taps had just been turned on North Sea oil revenues, and the resulting strong pound meant that any company in a trading sector, including steel, energy, cars and shipbuilding, was severely undermined by a sudden shift in the terms of trade - tougher exporting, much cheaper imports.

With that start to the era of North Sea revenue, the role of Margaret Thatcher was actually to do... not very much. She continued the previous government's approach to offshore revenue of absorbing revenue within general tax.

During the oil sector's boom years in the 1980s, that money was used to pay the bills for a deep recession, the loss of old industries, and the transition to a new type of economy. As with developments in other countries, it was more focussed on services, though in Britain, the growth was particularly in financial services.

Those funds were also used to allow for lower taxes. To free market ideologues, the best use of such a windfall was to put money into the pockets of those who could use it most efficiently, the private individual.

Where her privatisation programme made a difference was in selling off Britain's share of BP, and the British National Oil Corporation, which had been set up to take a stake in the North Sea under Labour.

Looking back now, we can see the alternative was both to retain that stake and to create a trust fund. Norway did both. In light of Britain's current predicament, it's an alternative that now looks quite attractive.

The choices made by the Thatcher government meant that it had more flexible employment, which meant more dynamism and perhaps more growth, but at the cost of labour market insecurity which continues today.

The choices made in the 1980s, to which Tony Blair would become heir, were for Britain to become more American in its economic model, and less European.

Would another leader have made the same choices? I'd argue Whitehall's choices would probably have been more nuanced.

Britain would be a little less individualistic, perhaps slightly less consumerist. And Britain's economy might have looked a bit more like that of France, where most of the 1980s were lived under a socialist presidency; with large nationalised companies, less flexible labour laws, greater social protection, but now facing deep-seated problems.

In short, Margaret Thatcher leaves a legacy, but it risks being overstated alongside the effect of changes that would have taken place anyway. In some areas, such as privatisation, she made the weather; in others, she rode the wave of history.

It sometimes feels now that the 1980s could not have happened without her. Even while living through the decade, it felt like she defined the times.

If you loathed her, everything you disliked could be blamed on "Thatcher's Britain". If you loved her, nothing could have been achieved without her; to hear the praise for her international role, you'd think the Soviet Union would still be going if it hadn't been for the Iron Lady.

Neither side is right. The 1980s would have come and gone without Margaret Thatcher. The question is what difference she made. Or to put it another way, how would other politicians have shaped or reacted to the trends that were already under way, and pressures already building.

For historians, the game of "what if?" is a dangerous one. Not being a historian, I'll give it a try anyway, at least on the state of the economy, and the economy of the state.

The economic pressures building by 1979 were of persistently high inflation; much of industry was in bad shape - a lot of it in the public sector and loss-making; and trade unions exerted a lot of power.

Whoever you blame for what had become known internationally in the 1970s as the "British disease", it needed a cure. It's simplistic to say that meant taming inflation and slaying the unions, as there was a problem also of poor quality British management.

Margaret Thatcher's biographer and devotee, Charles Moore, has argued today that, although she became known as a hugely divisive figure, she was not the instigator of division: Britain was already divided.

The biggest gear change in public spending had already been forced on the British government after 1976, when the Labour government had to go to the International Monetary Fund to seek support. The IMF imposed tough conditions on public spending, which contributed to strife in industrial relations and within the Labour Party.

That's why, without Margaret Thatcher, it's a fair bet that another Tory leader would have led the party to victory in 1979. If it were the man she ousted, Edward Heath, or the man she beat in the leadership contest, Willie Whitelaw, it would probably have been a 'wetter' or One Nation Tory approach to change - less radical and seeking to go with the grain.

It's unlikely that another Tory have been so forthright in forcing the pace, leading the Conservative Party from its radical right, and taking on dragons to slay, as a test of political virility.

Nevertheless, a Tory government under different leadership would surely have sought trade union reform, and continued with Labour's toughened approach on spending.

It would have been informed by the sense of failure that came out of the Heath government of 1970-74, when there had been a U-turn on economic policy and effective defeat at the hands of the National Union of Mineworkers.

That failure was the catalyst for internal challenge from the right, led by ideologues including Keith Joseph, and putting Margaret Thatcher into the leadership. So even without her in Downing Street, a new leader would have been challenged from the right to show similar backbone.

Would a different Conservative government have sought to sell off the many nationalised industries; steel, coal, shipbuilding, telecoms, gas, electricity, car manufacturing, much of the defence sector, British Airways, airports, most of the water industry and, later, rail as well.

Some of these were essential to finding the private funding for investment, notably in telecoms and utilities.

But in older industries, that was where the most divisive and painful decisions were felt, where communities that had been built around industries were exposed to the free market. In the coalfields, the steel towns and around the former shipyards; that's where the legacy remains painful a generation after Margaret Thatcher left office.

So would another prime minister have sought to reform these more gently within state ownership? The "what if?" question requires you to judge whether the Tories would have won a second term without Thatcher at the helm - a second term during which the privatisation agenda took root? And that, in turn, requires you to imagine that the Labour Party was electable in 1983.

After all, it wasn't Thatcher's doing that Labour's manifesto that year was known, by its own side, as "the longest suicide note in history", or that the splits gave rise to the Social Democrat Party, or that Argentina's General Galtieri offered himself up as another dragon for slaying, following his invasion of the Falklands.

There were big elements of Margaret Thatcher's political luck. The same factors might have kept another Tory leader in office, or a lack of resolve might not.

It's less clear that privatisation would have been pursued with anything like the vigour of Margaret Thatcher, as she "rolled back the frontiers of the state". In that, she led the world in a process that would quickly become a central condition imposed on other countries by the IMF and World Bank. It would later be embraced by the new nations of the collapsing Soviet bloc.

The pain inflicted on industrial communities - not least in Scotland - was not all down to the choices she made. At least as significant a factor was the high value of sterling in the early 1980s.

The taps had just been turned on North Sea oil revenues, and the resulting strong pound meant that any company in a trading sector, including steel, energy, cars and shipbuilding, was severely undermined by a sudden shift in the terms of trade - tougher exporting, much cheaper imports.

With that start to the era of North Sea revenue, the role of Margaret Thatcher was actually to do... not very much. She continued the previous government's approach to offshore revenue of absorbing revenue within general tax.

During the oil sector's boom years in the 1980s, that money was used to pay the bills for a deep recession, the loss of old industries, and the transition to a new type of economy. As with developments in other countries, it was more focussed on services, though in Britain, the growth was particularly in financial services.

Those funds were also used to allow for lower taxes. To free market ideologues, the best use of such a windfall was to put money into the pockets of those who could use it most efficiently, private individuals.

Where her privatisation programme made a difference was in selling off Britain's share of BP, and the British National Oil Corporation, which had been set up to take a stake in the North Sea under Labour.

Looking back now, we can see the alternative was both to retain that stake and to create a trust fund. Norway did both. In light of Britain's current predicament, it's an alternative that now looks quite attractive.

The choices made by the Thatcher government meant that employment law became more flexible, which meant more dynamism and probably a higher growth path. But it came at the price of labour market insecurity which continues today.

The choices made in the 1980s, to which Tony Blair would become heir, were for Britain to become more American in its economic model, and less European.

Would another leader have made the same choices? I'd argue Whitehall's choices would probably have been more nuanced.

Britain would be a little less individualistic, perhaps slightly less consumerist. And Britain's economy might have looked a bit more like that of France, where most of the 1980s were lived under a socialist presidency; with large nationalised companies, less flexible labour laws, greater social protection, but now facing deep-seated problems.

In short, Margaret Thatcher leaves a legacy, but it risks being overstated alongside the effect of changes that would have taken place anyway. In some areas, such as privatisation, she made the weather; in others, she rode the wave of history.