That was the word that ricocheted around my skull as I read the US congressional report into Apple Inc's tax arrangements.

Here are a few choice quotes:

"Apple Inc established an offshore subsidiary, Apple Operations International, which from 2009 to 2012 reported net income of $30bn, but declined to declare any tax residence, filed no corporate income tax return and paid no corporate income taxes to any national government for five years."

It is as though a bunch of alien techies arrived from Mars, sold us $30bn (£19.6bn) worth of smartphones and laptops, and then took all the moolah up to the stratosphere, where they simply circled the earth.

Also, another Apple affiliate, based in low-tax Ireland, Apple Sales International, buys Apple's finished products from a manufacturer in China and then re-sells them "at a substantial markup" to other parts of Apple's empire, and retains the profits.

So Irish-based Apples Sales International generated around $74bn (£48.5bn) in profits but "may have paid little or no income taxes to any national government on the vast bulk of those funds".

According to the senators on the Permanent Subcommitte on Investigations, Apple transferred offshore into low-tax countries the economic rights to its intellectual property - its valuable and usually patentable knowhow - with the result that it avoided around $10bn (£6.5bn) of US tax every year (what the senators characterise as $44bn, or £29bn, of US tax avoidance over the past four years).

What is the point of all this? Well the senators point out that Apple has continued to accumulate vast amounts of cash in places other than the US, and those cash holdings now exceed an eye-popping $102bn (£67bn).

Why does any of this matter?

Well it is part of a broad trend of multinationals paying a much smaller proportion of public sector costs in all the world's developed economies.

In the US, for example, corporate tax generated 32.1% of all federal taxes in 1952. Today that proportion has fallen to a puny 8.9%.

Similar trends of corporate taxes generating a shrinking share of the state's costs hold in the UK.

And at a time when the burden of government debt in the US, UK and much of Western Europe is rising in a way that many regard as unsustainable, the idea that big companies aren't paying their way becomes more resonant (as if you hadn't worked that out for yourself).

Here's the thing: the word "multinational" may be a bit of a misnomer. The brains that power and generate all that lovely income at a company like Apple - or Google, or Amazon, or Starbucks - are national.

Most of them were born in US hospitals, they went to US schools and universities, they were able to study rather than sitting at home defending their properties with shotguns thanks to American law and order.

And, of course, if the brains in these countries are Indian or British, the same dependence on their mother countries for the conditions that nurtured them would apply.

Which is why, some would argue, the desire of Apple and other multinationals to minimise the taxes they pay in the US, or anywhere for that matter, may be rational for them individually but is bonkers for them collectively - since over time it will erode the very infrastructure of the global economy which allows them to thrive.

Here are three other points that matter about all this.

First, hoarding cash in low-tax centres seems in some ways a bit pointless for publicly owned corporations - in that it creates enormous complications when it comes to getting the cash to its rightful owners, the shareholders.

It is perhaps a bit odd therefore that the investment institutions which own big multinationals have sat idly by for years while all this tax avoiding took place.

Second, the huge noise - on the internet especially - generated by the congressional and parliamentary investigations of tax avoiders is probably not good for brand Ireland.

If the Irish state is seen as perhaps the main facilitator of Apple and its ilk not paying their fair share in the US and UK, consumers and politicians in the rest of the world may not have quite such warm feelings towards any product or service badged Irish.

Finally, there must be a risk for Apple that the popularity of Apple's products will be damaged by the senatorial charge that it generates all this tax-free cash which then sits in its vaults and does nothing.

Surely the essence of Apple's brand is that its products make all of us more productive, in play or work. So for Apple to be seen as the world's greatest accumulator of cash that seemingly has little productive use may not be adding lustre to its image.

The question posed by today's Scotland Analysis Paper from the Treasury is whether a Scotland that separated from the rest of the UK would be able to retain the bigger banks that are part of that industry.

This is something of concern to the two largest Scottish banks, Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Bank of Scotland, and to Bank of Scotland's owner, Lloyds Banking Group. Its registered office is in Edinburgh, and can therefore be seen as Scottish in its entirety, although its top management is based in a London head office.

Directors of these banks are loathe to talk in public about their fears, because they don't want to be seen as influencing the highly charged debate on Scotland's future.

The nub of the problem was described to me by a senior Scottish banker: any big bank with a domicile or home in an independent Scotland might be seen as a much riskier borrower than an equivalent bank based in the UK, and it would therefore become much more expensive for that bank to borrow or raise vital finance.

"In my view," said the banker, "The moment that it looked as though Scotland were to win independence, funding costs would rise significantly, so RBS and Lloyds would have to move their homes to the City of London".

So is this banker right? I should say his views are held by all the bankers I have spoken to about this over many months. But it doesn't mean they are correct, which is why it is worth unpicking their arguments.

There are basically two reasons why RBS and Lloyds might be viewed by those who lend to them as an altogether riskier proposition if Scotland separated from the rest of the UK.

First, they are very big relative to the size of the British economy, and they are enormous in proportion to the Scottish economy.

For example, the assets or loans and investments of British banks relative to the size of British GDP is around 500%.

Now many would say that shows that Britain's banking industry is way too big for the health and stability of the British economy.

It means, arguably, that if there was another systemic crisis for banks any time soon, the costs of saving those banks for a second time would be unaffordable for taxpayers - bankrupt banks would bankrupt the state.

Which is why officials such as Andy Haldane at the Bank of England are beginning to ask whether the big missing part of banking reform in recent years has been the absence of any attempt to curtail the size of banks.

If Haldane is right that size matters, in a bad way, then the implications for an independent Scotland would be troubling indeed - because in a nominal sense, Scottish banking assets are equivalent to 1,250% of Scottish GDP.

Just RBS on its own, according to its latest published balance sheet, has loans and investments of £1.3tn, equivalent to more than eight times Scottish GDP.

The Treasury's paper says that the bailout provided by the UK authorities to RBS in the crisis of 2008 would have been equivalent to 211% of Scotland's GDP - which suggests that an independent Scotland, all other things being equal, would not have been able to afford to bail out RBS.

It is probably worth pointing out at this juncture that Alex Salmond, Scotland's first minister and proponent of Scottish independence, supported RBS's ill-judged takeover in 2007 of the bulk of ABN Amro, the deal which massively increased both RBS's size and precariousness.

So, some would say, it is quite tricky for Mr Salmond to argue that all things would not have been equal in an autonomous Scotland.

Anyway, the point is that when investors and companies lend to a bank and when they invest in them, they look at what would happen to that bank if all went pear-shaped and said bank got into a serious financial mess.

They look at whether the government of the country which is home to that bank would bail the bank out in a crisis - thus reducing losses for the bank's creditors - and whether the relevant government could in practice afford to bail out the bank.

The point is that those who lend to RBS would note that the UK government was, in practice, only just able to afford to bail it out.

And they would have considerable doubts about whether the government of an independent Scotland would have deep enough pockets to do the same.

So if Scotland were to become independent, all other things being equal (the ghastly weasel words again), they might either refuse to lend to RBS or charge prohibitively expensive interest rates for doing so.

In those circumstances, RBS would have to pack its bags and move to London pronto.

Also, it is not just the strain on government finances of bailing out a bank that would be a concern to creditors of RBS and Lloyds.

There would be an even more pressing concern for them, which would be the banks' access to emergency liquidity and emergency loans when commercial sources of money dry up.

The great triggers both of the 2007/8 global banking crisis and the 2012 eurozone banking crisis were that providers of credit to banks went on strike - and central banks had to step in with life-supporting loans.

Any bank with its headquarters in Scotland would need certainty about which central bank it could turn to for money when markets freeze - which central bank would be its lender of last resort.

Here is the thing: the Bank of England would only be prepared to act as the provider of loans to Scottish banks in a crisis if it was in charge of regulating and supervising these banks, as at present.

The Bank of England could not risk its own viability, and British taxpayers money, on supporting banks it could not boss around, in a supervisory sense.

Or to put it another way, the practicalities of whether RBS and Lloyds could continue to be Scottish banks are intricately bound up in a separate, hugely important, debate - which is whether Scotland would be part of a formal sterling zone, with the Bank of England as central bank for a separated Scotland.

And for Scotland to be a formal part of such a sterling zone, the Bank of England and HM Treasury would wish to impose constraints on the financial risks that Scotland's banks could take - to limit liabilities for British taxpayers.

Which could be yet another reason why Scottish banks might wish to move to London, where the Bank of England would judge their sustainability - and therefore the magnitude of risks they could take - on the basis of the British government's resources rather than the Scottish government's.

A couple of things follow, about the necessary conditions for an RBS or a Lloyds to remain headquartered in an independent Scotland (this is all on the assumption that an independent Scotland would view the high-skilled jobs associated with these banks having a Caledonian home as worth the risks of underwriting the banks' liabilities).

First, that investors - the notorious Mr Market - would impose limits on the scope of Scottish independence, if it wishes to remain the domicile of big banks.

This is uncontroversial. It is precisely what Mr Market is saying to the eurozone's governments if they wish their currency union to survive - namely that they have to pool their financial resources, and cede a degree of autonomous control over taxing and spending, to save the euro.

Second, that the more the British government is successful in reducing the innate riskiness of all British banks and their size, the easier it would be for Scotland to secede and keep its big banks.

The UK oil giant complains that the interpretation of rules for assessing "business economic loss" are being systematically abused such that colossal sums are being handed to enterprises that suffered no detriment from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

According to an appeal document recently filed in the US courts by BP against the legally agreed settlement procedure, the company has "been ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars - soon likely to be billions - for fictitious and inflated losses".

BP is so worried by the potential magnitude of alleged undeserved payments it is making to companies that it is planning to ask the British prime minister and chancellor for help in persuading the US government to intervene. It is hopeful that David Cameron will raise the issue at the G8 meeting of the government of the world's richest countries, which the UK is hosting next month.

The court filing warns that BP will be "irreparably harmed" unless the compensation system is reformed fast. According to BP sources, the rate at which cash is leaking from the company could turn into a serious new financial crisis for the company, putting at risk its dividend and making it vulnerable to a takeover by another oil company.

In a little-noticed note attached to BP's first-quarter results, published last month, the company warned that the $8.2bn it has set aside to cover compensation payments will be "significantly" too little, even if its appeal against the settlement procedures is successful. And if it loses the appeal, there will be "a further significant increase to the total estimated cost".

BP also warned in its results that this settlement "is uncapped except for economic loss claims related to the Gulf Seafood industry".

The massive compensation payments stem from the comprehensive settlement agreement BP reached with damaged entities and people in April 2012, whose point was to compensate them for profits lost as a consequence of the spill. The US courts granted final approval to this settlement on 21 December last year.

Under the agreement, claimants could ask for "loss of income, earnings or profits suffered" as a result of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

What has become of deep concern to BP is the way that this loss of income or profits is calculated by businesses and approved by a court-appointed Claims Administrator.

In practice, according to BP, companies don't have to show a fall in profits as measured on normal accounting practices. All they have to show, says the court filing, is that cash flow in a specified month or months is lower than cash flow in the same month or months before the oil spill.

The fundamental flaw, according to BP, is that neither the claimants or the Claims Administrator are under an obligation to match costs in a particular period with the revenues that they generate. So that if there is a timing difference between a company incurring expenses and subsequently receiving associated income, the claimant can ask for recompense based merely on presentation of the expenses as a notional loss.

This is in effect a licence, according to BP, for businesses to claim vast amounts of money to which they are not entitled. And what's worse, according to BP, this practice of detaching revenues and losses was formalised by a court ruling earlier this year.

One consequence is that lawyers in the affected region of Louisiana and adjacent states are urging any business which can show a fall in cash flow since the oil spill to make a claim. BP claims that "plaintiffs lawyers across the Gulf region are now openly advertising that the settlement is a way for claimants to collect payouts even if they have no losses at all".

BP gives many examples of businesses which have received huge compensation payments when they have suffered no harm from the oil spill. Here are some choice ones:

1) "The Claims Administrator awarded more than $3m in base compensation to a rice farmer based on a 'simple one month delay in the receipt of 91% of the claimant's revenues,' because the bulk of the claimant's 2009 revenue was recorded in November while the bulk of its 2010 revenues was recorded in December".

2) "A construction company located in Zone D - the farthest area from the spill - was awarded $4.8m by the Claims Administrator despite 'negative revenue and other obvious revenue mis-statements' and even after the claimant had admitted its monthly records 'over-stated benchmark year profits by over $1m".

3) "An advertising firm was awarded almost $3m as a result of a $2.1m bulk purchase of advertising time in August 2010. Because this advertising purchase was not matched with the revenue to which it corresponded… the firm appeared to have an artificial monthly loss in August, followed by artificially high profits when the advertising time was used".

4) "$3.3m [was awarded] to a law office in central Louisiana, even though its profit in the year of the spill exceeded its benchmark profits by 10%".

BP says that the way its settlement is being implemented by the Courts Administrator, with the support of the Louisiana district court, is "poised to become a black mark on the American justice system", when it could have become a positive landmark because of "its ambitious size, its innovative nature and the speed with which it was negotiated to compensate injured parties".

It continues: "If this travesty is allowed to continue, BP will be irreparably harmed and future defendants will be reluctant to settle because they cannot be confident that settlement agreements will be construed textually and fairly".

Perhaps not devastatingly humiliated, though perhaps mildly so - which means that there may be relatively more heat on the Treasury.

Here is why.

I am informed that the Financial Services Authority - which has now been broken up into the Prudential Regulation Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority - never approved the Co-op's abortive plan to acquire 631 Lloyds branches and thus treble in size.

Instead, a couple of years ago, it set the Co-op hurdles it had to get over to obtain that formal approval.

These hurdles were all officially, copiously and formally documented, and were about the amount of capital the enlarged bank had to have and operational capability, among other things.

I am reliably told that the Co-op Bank never surmounted these hurdles. One source said to me: "I never thought it would get over the hurdles; I never thought the deal would be done".

In the event, the Co-op pulled out of the planned takeover last month, before formally asking for the FSA's approval.

So, if the regulator always had its doubts that that deal with Lloyds would be consummated, why was it negotiated so expensively over all those many months.

And why did the Chancellor give it public support?

A source told me it was all about "MPs love of mutuals" and "the hope in the Treasury that an enlarged Co-op would be a decent competitor to the hated giant banks".

But if the FSA was never persuaded that the merger made sense, shouldn't it have vetoed it?

Well, I am told that the FSA did not feel it could block a deal that had so much support in Parliament.

All of which may be understandable.

But if the world in general was given the impression by the FSA's silence and the Chancellor's eloquence that the Co-op was fit enough to swallow all those Lloyds branches and assets, those right at the apex of the Co-op group in the biggest broadest sense - the Co-op that includes supermarkets, funeral homes, and so on - may have been lulled into a sense of complacency about the true state of affairs at the Co-op Bank.

The non-bankers on the Co-op's top board may not have asked tough enough questions about the true state of health at their bank. Which would go some way to explain why they learned only recently that property loans Co-op Bank acquired in 2009 with the takeover of Britannia are pretty stinky and loss generating.

And another thing. If the FSA was happy to stand back from giving a formal opinion on whether the Co-op was the right buyer of the Lloyds branches, will its successor body, the PRA, still hold its peace now that questions have arisen about whether the Co-op should stay in banking?

With all the uncertainties about how the Co-op will fill the hole in Co-op Bank's capital resources, it seems unlikely that the PRA will remain quite so arms length.

As the Co-op evaluates - in partnership with the newly created regulator, the Prudential Regulation Authority - how much additional capital it needs to find as a protection against losses, we will learn quite how expensive.

But the woes of the Co-op have the potential to be expensive, in a reputational sense - and not just for the Co-op's management.

Remember this is a bank that until only a few weeks ago was negotiating to buy 631 branches from Lloyds and thus treble in size.

And it was doing this with the blessing of the Treasury and chancellor of the Exchequer, who last year hailed the Co-op's expansion as creating "a new challenger bank" that would give "real choice to customers and supports the economy".

What's more, the regulator, the now disbanded Financial Services Authority, did not veto the Co-op's plan to massively expand - which looks a bit odd, now that the Co-op is assessing whether the costs of running its much smaller operation are affordable.

And it is not as though the Co-op's problems came out of a clear blue sky,

A couple of years ago, a financier planning a possible bid for Lloyds branches told me - and the FSA - that he did not believe that the Co-op was strong enough in a financial, management or IT sense to acquire the Lloyds branches and assets.

He was told by the FSA that the decision on the best bidder would be a "political one" not a regulatory one.

Hmmm.

What's more, the Co-op Bank's accounts should perhaps have given a pretty good warning of problems ahead.

I looked at these in some detail over the weekend, and they make pretty grim reading.

Here is what stood out for me. At the end of 2011, the Co-op Bank had £1.45bn of corporate loans on its "watchlist". In other words, it thought that £1.45bn of lending to companies - much of it property lending - could go bad.

Why didn't that warning of potential trouble afoot ring stronger alarm bells for the Co-op Group's top management, or for Lloyds, or the FSA or the Treasury - all of whom might have wondered whether the Co-op was the best buyer of Lloyds's branches?

The point is that in the subsequent year, many of the companies with loans on the Co-op's watchlist did in fact default. Corporate loans in default at the Co-op jumped from £922m to just under £2bn.

And that rise in defaults was a big contributor to the colossal £674m loss that the Co-op incurred in 2012.

So here's another source of potential embarrassment for the now defunct FSA. Many of the loans that have gone bad at the Co-op were acquired when it bought the Britannia Building Society in 2009 - a takeover that was regarded by the FSA at the time as very helpful, because it apparently strengthened the Britannia.

What we now know is that the strengthening of the Britannia has weakened the Co-op.

So how much additional capital will the Co-op have to find for its bank?

The information in its latest accounts makes it difficult to be precise - except that the £800m it hopes to raise from the sale of its life and general insurance operations will not be enough (I am authoritatively told), so it may well be obliged to sell or mortgage some of its non-financial operations.

Here are what I regard as the important numbers.

At the end of 2012, the Co-op had £3.7bn of commercial loans, home loans and personal loans that it classified as impaired or bad. Against that, it was holding a provision for potential losses on these loans of £643m.

In other words the Co-op believes it will ultimately lose just 17% of these bad loans.

At the same time, the Co-op has loss-absorbing equity capital of £1.6bn.

Or to put it another way, impaired loans minus provisions for losses as a percentage of loss-absorbing capital is 194%.

Which is another way of saying the Co-op has a good deal of additional capital to find.

Are its woes wealth imperilling for its depositors and savers (or rather for those with more than the £85,000 insured limit)?

I think that is unlikely. As I said on Friday, the wider Co-op group has other assets it can sell to plug the hole.

And there's another thing. Having welcomed the Co-op's plan to buy Lloyds branches, and having therefore invested his personal capital in the Co-op, the chancellor can't afford for there to be a serious accident at that bank.

As I said on Radio 4's Today programme this morning, the Treasury will be working over time with the Prudential Regulation Authority to find an orderly way to ensure it continues to be business as usual for the Co-op's customers.

Its credit rating has been downgraded by Moody's to "not prime" (a euphemism for junk) and it's losing its chief executive, Barry Tootell.

How serious are these events?

Well I am told that Mr Tootell had been planning to leave for some time - in part because the big part of his job, preparing for the massive expansion of the bank through the takeover of 631 branches from Lloyds, is no longer happening.

He has been replaced on an "acting" basis by Rod Bulmer, already in the bank and who is apparently a good thing.

In a way, what is most interesting is that, as I understand it, Mr Tootell's departure announcement was brought forward a bit, because the Co-op felt it needed to be doing something, in the wake of the rather dour assessment of its bank's prospects by Moody's.

So what is the significance of Moody's downgrade?

Well, to state the bleedin' obvious, in the aftermath of the ratings agencies' catastrophically poor performance in the run-up to the great crash of 2007-8, their pronouncements don't have the quite the authority they once did.

That said, the downgrade is likely to make it a bit more expensive for the Co-op Bank to borrow, which doesn't help when its profitability is so squeezed (as it is).

But it makes four big points that the Co-op can't simply bat away:

Now one of the most striking things about Co-op Bank's customers is they seem to love their bank rather more than would be true of customers of the bigger banking groups. That is certainly the evidence of letters and emails I was sent by many of them after the takeover was abandoned of all those branches and assets from Lloyds.

So should those customers be anxious about Moody's downgrade?

Well there is no reason to believe that their savings are seriously at risk of incurring losses. As Co-op says today, it has plenty of cash or liquidity to hand - I understand it has a cash liquidity buffer of £3bn.

Also, the parent group is huge, with assets of £82bn and cash not far off £7bn. If the worse came to the worst, there is plenty of other stuff that could be sold, to provide additional capital to the bank.

What I think the downgrade highlights is a point I made after the collapse of the Lloyds deal - which is whether the Co-operative group, with its leading position in supermarkets and funeral homes (for example), is the best owner of a bank, at a time when profit margins in banking are so low, and may remain so.

How would those who work in all those other Co-op businesses feel about any profits they generate being poured into the bank, thus limiting the ability of their operations to expand?

Moody's downgrade will further sharpen a debate within the Co-op, under its new chief executive Euan Sutherland, about whether it should get out of banking.

There is a bit of nonsense in my blog, for which I apologise.

When I was away from my computer screen, I asked the Co-op to email me a number for the value of group assets, so that I could give you some sense of what it could flog - in a worst case - if it needed cash in a hurry.

What it sent me was the assets including banking and insurance assets - i.e. including the loans and investments it has made. For some reason, it didn't occur to me that the £82bn included all those tens of billions of pounds of financial assets (my pathetic excuse is I have a cold).

Anyway, that enormous number is only semi relevant.

More relevant for assessing the ability of the non-financial part of the group to support the bank is the Co-op's gross assets in non-financial operations of £6.3bn and the larger Co-op's net equity of £4.5bn.

So there is value in the rest of the Co-op, but it is not unlimited.

Which rather reinforces the notion that the long-term health of the broader Co-op may require it to find a buyer for the bank.

But as and when they are privatised (and as you may recall, RBS hopes that'll be next year), who actually deserves to own them?

To become sententious for an instant (don't moan), this is a political, ethical and practical question.

The starting point is this: the Lib Dem bit of the government is keen on Portman Capital's notion of distributing all the shares to us, to citizens, for free, and the Tory part is not ideologically opposed; a more traditional Treasury approach would be to offer a portion of the shares being privatised to retail investors (people, not institutions) at a discount.

Let's ignore the logistical challenge (ahem) of registering as owners of these shares some 30 million or so different people, which would be required by the free-shares-for-all scheme. Or to put this another way, I am going to make the heroic assumption that if you chuck money at this problem (and it would be a good deal of money), it could be solved (which may be the lesson of the non-disastrous sale of tickets for the London Olympics).

The question is, who actually has a right to the free shares windfall?

When people like me write or say that taxpayers implicitly own them at this moment, there is an implication that only those who make a net contribution to the costs of running the state and its apparatus have that ownership right.

In other words, perhaps the free shares should only go to those people who pay more in taxes, perhaps, than they receive in cash benefits and tax credits.

But that number would be millions and millions of people fewer than all citizens. And most of these would be on relatively high incomes (to state the bloomin' obvious).

That narrow distribution would certainly be seen as very unfair by those who lost their jobs or cannot find work as a consequence of a banking crisis that not only led to the semi-nationalisation of RBS and Lloyds but also precipitated the worst recession since the 1930s.

It would exclude, for example, something like a million unemployed young people aged 18 to 24.

Also left out would be those whose incomes have been squeezed by our economic plight to a level where they are net recipients of benefits. Would that be just?

And what about the vast numbers of retired people on relatively low pensions who currently pay no income tax, but who paid tax all their lives, prior to retirement? Should they be deprived of the shares?

Social harmony would probably not be promoted if those who continue to coin it in our stagnating economy, including our friends the bankers, were to receive the free shares.

Perhaps the definition of taxpayer should go wider, given that it is impossible for any of us to avoid paying VAT and duty on booze and fags. If we think the shares should go to taxpayers, should they simply go to everyone, since we all pay indirect taxes?

But on that definition of taxpayers, the shares should go to children and foreigners, as well as income-tax payers.

In fact if paying tax is the qualification, foreigners resident here for tax purposes should certainly receive the shares. So does it feel fair to you that those only passing through the UK should receive RBS and Lloyds shares?

Perhaps therefore the shares should go to all British citizens. But should that include prisoners, or those on community service, or people on remand?

And here we also get into a practical difficulty, which is - as the Home Office is painfully aware - there is no reliable database of all British citizens.

Then maybe it should be those with National Insurance numbers who get the bank shares. But that would include lots of foreigners and prisoners. And, I am told, it is quite hard to prevent shares going to fraudsters, if the relevant dataset is those with NI numbers.

An alternative qualification would be registering to vote. But that would be seen as in effect imposing a financial penalty on those exercising their important right to opt out of the democratic system.

Or to put all this another way, the chancellor and prime minister would have to make quite a hard policy decision when deciding precisely who is entitled to the free shares.

And before taking the plunge in deciding who has really earned an entitlement to these shares, Messrs Cameron and Osborne may remember that the proceeds of a conventional privatisation by sale would be enjoyed by all of us anyway, in that those proceeds would reduce the national debt.

So our leaders may wonder why they should go to all the expensive bother of handing shares to everyone, if flogging the banks in the normal way would be a boon to all "taxpayers" (to use that imprecise word again).

Except of course that Portman has come up with the clever wheeze of saying that although the shares should be distributed to all of us for free, as and when we sell the shares the Treasury would get back from us a sum equivalent to what it has invested in the banks, and we would only get any profit over and above that

But this ruse to secure some money for the Exchequer would in effect lock up the Treasury's capital in the banks for years and even decades (it could not force the new owners to sell). And it would therefore be potentially very expensive for the Treasury (and, by implication, for "taxpayers" in aggregate).

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that the free-shares idea may be seductive, but it isn't a free lunch for government or citizens.

So what about the more traditional "Tell-Sid" privatisation route, of offering the shares to all of us as individuals at a discount to the price that the investment institutions would have to pay?

Well here we run into the question of whether "caveat emptor" (buyer beware) can and should apply.

The point is that in a stagnating economy, and at this phase of their recovery, RBS and Lloyds are not the kind of solid, reliable utilities - gas, electricity, telecoms and so on - that were privatised in the 1980s.

They are highly geared bets on whether the British economy emerges from its long period of torpor.

Solid and sustained economic recovery could see their shares double or even treble. A return to painful contraction would be a short cut to painful impoverishment for their shareholders.

Posit for a moment that millions of British people invested some of their savings in Lloyds and RBS just before an election. And then the eurozone imploded, mullering bank share prices and the wealth of all those who bought them.

That might not be the backdrop that the Tories and Lib Dems would ideally choose for their general election campaigns.

The previous government took the decision to buy £66bn of shares in RBS and Lloyds over a weekend in the autumn of 2008. It's not altogether surprising perhaps that the successor government is taking rather longer to work out how to get rid of these shares.

You will recall the issue became politically charged not that long ago, with messrs Cameron and Clegg not exactly speaking as one about whether it is unfair and economically harmful for employers to give work experience to the children of mates (PM and deputy disagree on interns).

Many of us may be hypocrites about this. On the one hand, any employer knows that fishing for talent in the broadest and deepest talent pool is best for his or her business.

On the other hand, it is hard to resist the pleadings of old friends or business associates, desperate for their kids to be doing something a bit more productive than exchanging not-so-profound reflections about the world on Facebook when not studying.

And, of course, the lazy propensity in all of us encourages us to bring into our own work environments the children from the backgrounds and families we know, rather than someone whose credentials are only on paper.

So I was intrigued by an email from a London-based charity, which was forwarded to me by an outraged well-heeled parent.

This charity has taken the ancient practice of trading summer internships for assorted favours to its logical conclusion: it has created a market in them.

The charity is called the Second Half Centre, a drop-in centre for older people in London, and it is the brainchild of Jill Shaw Ruddock, a former banker and author of a book that accentuates the positives of life after menopause.

The enterprising Ms Ruddock persuaded seven businesses - in finance, fashion, architecture, art and publishing - to offer work placements which she could auction.

The participating companies are Net-a-Porter, ISSA, Oppenheimer, Man Group, Amanda Levete Architect, Peters Fraser & Dunlop and the Gagosian Gallery.

Her note to prospective bidders said:

"You may have already organised work experience for your son or daughter, but you probably have quite a few friends who haven't yet. I would be grateful if you could either PLACE A BID or FORWARD THIS EMAIL on to friends who have children 16 years of age or older...

"Please start the bidding at whatever level you think appropriate... Any internship can be secured immediately with a firm bid of £5,000".

So there you have it: the market price of a short internship for a teenager is £5,000. And after the auction closed, Ms Ruddock had raised around £30,000 (so her representative told me).

Now to state the obvious, many people will be shocked by the idea that money can so directly and crudely secure possible career advantage for the children of the rich.

To be clear, spending a week with Man Group or Oppenheimer is no guarantee of a future massive income in the City. But it provides the intern with valuable knowledge and contacts. And it looks good on a CV.

So the five grand does buy a leg up. And to state the bloomin' obvious, if all internships were sold, then those brought up in social housing or on council estates could say goodbye to any hope of obtaining direct personal experience of work in a top company while young.

The dad who sent me Ms Ruddock's email felt nauseated by the trade.

But I am not sure his reaction is reasonable. He routinely gives a few days desirable work experience in his own respected and high-paying firm to the children of chums.

Money may not be changing hands in his case, but there is still the valuable if intangible trade in favours owed and given.

There is an argument that Ms Ruddock has simply brought some honesty and clarity to this transaction - and made some money for a good cause in the process (she says she has to find imaginative ways to raise money, because only 10% of her funding comes from the public sector).

What she has shown, arguably, is that the process of allocating internships is staggeringly inefficient and unfair, reinforcing the advantages of the haves and further marginalising the have-nots.

Many would say that when a summer work placement can be sold to the rich for £5,000 a go, it shows that the system of allocating desirable placements badly needs cleaning up.

So what about the content of his argument that the UK would now be better off outside of the European Union.

Perhaps his most interesting point is this one:

"Too much of British business and industry feels... secure in the warm embrace of the European single market and is failing to recognise that today's great export opportunities lie in the developing world, particularly in Asia."

In other words, he is not claiming that those who run our companies agree with him that exit from the EU is optimal for them or the economy.

As it happens, those who run our biggest companies would tend to be horrified at the idea of withdrawal from the EU.

Our multinationals, unlike those of Switzerland, increasingly think of themselves as global corporate citizens, as much as British citizens. And whether they started life as British or not, they have a mindset that they are in Britain because it is an attractive place to be located within the EU.

Bosses of big banks and financial institutions would have this European mindset in spades. And many of them would take serious issue with Lord Lawson's idea that they would be liberated to thrive again, outside of the supposedly deadening clutches of EU financial reform and its planned new tax on financial transactions.

Since the crash of 2008, they've felt - if anything - more bashed and battered by UK regulators and politicians than by EU ones. And Lord Lawson, with his partly successful campaign to reinforce barriers between retail and investment banking operations, would not be seen by them as a champion of City laissez faire.

Of course smaller companies, including smaller City ones, are more patriotic in a conventional sense. But right now and in recent years they have been less important to British economic performance than the giant companies - although the government is desperate for smaller business to increase its relative output and influence.

I am not sure whether it is a paradox or not, but smaller and medium-size companies in the UK, which tend to have more eurosceptic bosses than bigger companies, are less important to British prosperity than smaller companies in Italy or Germany, for example.

All that said, the consensus of those in charge of businesses large and tiny would be for changing the terms of EU membership, to reduce the regulatory burden on them (yes, I know you know this).

In other words, they are hoping that David Cameron succeeds in his ambition of scaling back aspects of EU rules and regulations that they see as undermining their competitiveness.

Lord Lawson, never one to mince his opinions, thinks the prime minister will fail, and that - anyway - companies are wrong to place their faith in him.

But let's return to Lawson's claim, that ease of trading with the EU damages the UK because it somehow prevents British businesses working hard enough to gain access to the faster growing markets of Asia and Latin America.

If there is something in this, one important question is why it doesn't apply to Germany - whose exports to China, per capita, are more than four times the UK's.

However, it is important to note that ease of access to the EU market has not been an unalloyed boon for the UK.

For years, the UK has run a significant current account deficit with the rest of the EU. In other words, our business with the EU has contributed fairly significantly to the growing indebtedness of the UK, at a time when many would say the debt burden on the UK is unsustainably high (and, to remind you, I am talking here about the aggregate of household, business, financial sector and government debt - not public sector debt in isolation).

Of course there has been an enormous deficit in British trade with China. But the UK's consistent surplus with the US shows that Britain isn't doomed to be constantly in the red with economies regarded as formidable.

For decades, and pretty consistently since the UK joined the European Common Market, the EU's previous incarnation in 1973, the UK has been a deficit nation in its trading relationship with the rest of the world as a whole rather than a surplus nation.

Some would argue that the biggest problem currently faced by the UK is its failure since the great crash of 2008 to start generating a current account surplus, in spite of sharp falls in the value of sterling that should have made UK exports more competitive - because with the current account deficit bigger than at any time since 1989, it is impossible for the overall indebtedness of the UK economy to shrink.

The European Commission itself forecasts that the UK will continue to be a significant net borrower from the rest of the world for at least the next couple of years (at a rate of 2.5% of GDP in 2013 and 1.8% next year - compared with 3.5% in 2012).

So maybe Lord Lawson can be seen as kicking off an important debate, which is whether the UK will find it easier to start paying its way in the world on the inside - or the outside - of the EU.

For the first three months of the year, it made a profit at the operating level, before tax and after tax, which may be a unique occurrence since the crash of 2008.

And although its pre-tax profit of £826m is less than it ought to be generating on a quarterly basis, given the size of its balance sheet and market share, it is a considerable improvement on the £1.5bn loss it made for the comparable period last year.

There has even been a modest increase in its net lending to small businesses, after years of being criticised for shrinking this lending - which RBS's chairman Sir Philip Hampton attributes in part to the Bank of England's provision of cheap funds through the Funding for Lending Scheme.

So RBS believes that during the course of next year, it will have shed most of its toxic residual assets and will have completed its reconstruction.

This means, says Sir Philip, that as of the middle of next year - and possibly earlier - RBS will be in a fit enough state for the government to start selling its huge stake, to begin the process of privatisation (see him saying this here on the RBS website).

The unmissable implication is that Sir Philip would dearly love the government to do that.

What Sir Philip and his chief executive, Stephen Hester, can't control is what happens to RBS's share price - which will have a big bearing on whether the Chancellor, George Osborne, wants to start the privatisation.

The terrifying point for Mr Osborne is that if he sold the whole of taxpayers' stake in RBS right now, an eye-popping loss of £18bn would be generated for the state - and the loss would only be a bit less if measured by reference to the carrying value of the shares in the government's books, rather than what the Treasury, under the previous chancellor, Alistair Darling, actually paid for them.

One highly sensitive and contentious political and investment question is whether the prospects for taxpayers getting all their money back would be enhanced if the government took permanent ownership of RBS's residual stinky assets, ran them down over the next decade, and only privatised a completely cleaned up bank next year (see here for more on this).

Next month, Mr Osborne may come under pressure from the Parliamentary Commission for Banking Standards he created to break up RBS into such a so-called "good bank" and "bad bank". That may irk him because hitherto he has been keen not to keep on his books what remains of RBS's more poisonous assets, likely to have a written-down value of around £40bn by the end of the year.

But the outgoing Governor of the Bank of England, Sir Mervyn King, believes that such financial engineering would improve the prospects for what he sees as a liberation of RBS back into the private sector.

Sir Mervyn would also argue that so long as the Treasury kept RBS's stinkier assets long enough, and felt under no pressure to get rid of them in a fire sale, taxpayers would even end up (more than likely) making a profit on these putrid loans and investments.

So if the government were to start the unwieldy process of privatising RBS (which would almost certainly be the biggest privatisation in UK corporate history), what price would it need to receive for the shares to avoid a loss?

Unfortunately, this is not the easiest question to answer.

According to UKFI, which manages the government's stakes in the banks, the price actually paid by the Treasury for its 82% stake was 502p per share.

However the valuation in the government's books is 407p per share - a fairly chunky difference.

That lower "book" value captures a loss that the government has already absorbed on the investment: the loss is the difference between what the government paid for the shares and the market price of RBS on the days the then Chancellor, Alistair Darling, actually handed over the money for the shares.

But 407p isn't likely to be seen by the National Audit Office, the watchdog that is supposed to prevent the government wasting taxpayers' money, as the true book value of the government's stake.

That is because the 407p valuation is thought to include too low a valuation for something called the "dividend access share", which gives the government enhanced dividends compared with other shareholders and needs to be bought out by RBS prior to privatisation.

So if we are going on "true" book value, that could be as high as 440p.

Or to put it another way, George Osborne has a choice of three numbers for the price he would need to receive for RBS shares to prevent a loss for taxpayers, 407p, 440p and 502p.

Most investment purists would see the correct number as 502p.

If the chancellor were to ape the often cynical behaviour of big companies when faced with similar accounting dilemmas, he would probably choose the lowest possible price - of 407p.

So politics being what it is, I suspect he will claim success if he can get 440p.

All of which may seem a bit academic right now, with RBS shares massively underwater, as they say, at 290p. Or to put it another way, the notional loss for taxpayers today on their 82% stake in RBS is a maximum of £20bn and well over £10bn on any valuation.

And what has emerged, not all of it juicy and succulent, tells us something about the soil of rather uneven quality that is today's British and global economy.

So, for example, in April 2008 Carphone Warehouse sold half of its core operation to the US electronics giant Best Buy for £1.15bn.

And although that core business has done OK since then, and it is in one bit of retail that doesn't look too hairy (smartphones and tablets), Best Buy itself has not done so brilliantly. And to state the obvious, British and European retail isn't exactly flavour of the month with investors, for all the obvious reasons.

So Carphone is buying back that half share for less than half what Best Buy paid. Which looks like a pretty nice job for the company created by Charles Dunstone - who is about £30m wealthier this morning, as a result of an 11% rise in Carphone's share price.

And then there is Lloyds, which rather controversially reinforced its position as the UK's largest retail bank towards the end of 2008, with the rescue takeover of ailing HBOS.

With its massive market power, there was always going to be a strong profits recovery at Lloyds - although the past few years have probably seen the worst case of indigestion from one British company swallowing another, as losses on HBOS's reckless lending have been eye-poppingly vast.

Years later than Lloyds' management hoped, that recovery has arrived, with underlying profits trebling in the first three months of the year to £1.5bn, and statutory or official profits increasing more than seven times to £2bn.

The recovery has been at some cost to lives and British prosperity, with tens of thousands of job losses, curtailed lending and the disposal of poor quality assets.

But Lloyds insists it is supporting the British economy again - with net lending to small businesses rising against the trend of what other banks are doing, and overall lending down only a fraction.

Big profits also means substantial tax payable, of £500m for the three months, most of it to the UK Exchequer (although I am unclear whether much of that will actually turn up in the government's coffers for some years, given that for the time being Lloyds can presumably minimize its tax payments by utilising - to use the jargon - all those enormous tax losses generated by HBOS loans that went bad).

And Lloyds' rehabilitation brings forward the day when taxpayers' 39% stake in the bank can be privatized. If, as seems likely, regulators allow Lloyds to resume dividend payments in about 2015, sale of at least some of the state's holding should take place around that time.

Well the PAC is really talking about the future when it says that the Infrastructure Plan "is a list of projects, not a real plan with a strategic vision and clear priorities".

As you may know, this is an issue close to my heart, because my wife, the writer Sian Busby - a lifelong non-smoker - died of lung cancer at the age of 51 in September (which is why this is a slightly different blog from many I write).

A tricky issue for it is how to respond to the recommendation from the Governor of the Bank of England that Royal Bank of Scotland should be cleaved in two, with the remaining toxic assets - and they are pretty stinky - retained in the public sector, while "good" RBS is privatised.

The European Commission is forcing Lloyds to dispose of this operation, which is being rebranded as TSB, to promote competition, and that will still happen - by floating the separated business on the stock market.

In extending by a year and broadening to other credit providers its scheme to supply cheap funds to banks - the Funding for Lending Scheme - the Bank of England is introducing a new incentive for small business lending.

Serious reform is necessary, he said, because we are in "a serious depression".

Companies, for understandable reasons, tend to wait till they see a consistent pattern of rising demand from customers before they embark on ambitious plans to expand capacity and hire lots of new people.

Pulling out of the US, with the abandonment of its Fresh & Easy venture, is costing it £1.2bn in money and probably as much again in loss of face.

What they mean is that the French energy giant says it needs a commitment of between 35 and 40 years on the price to be paid by consumers for the power generated by Hinkley, before it presses the button on £14bn of expenditure for the two new reactors.