SOME EIGHT years ago at Harvard University Alex Salmond, then First Minister, described his ambition for Scotland to become a “Celtic Lion” economy. In that speech he suggested that we could join with the other small, dynamic trading nations of northwestern Europe in what he termed an “arc of prosperity;” a crescent of agile and growing economies reaching from Iceland and Ireland in the North Atlantic to Norway and Denmark on the other side of the North Sea.
On 15 September 2008 the largest bankruptcy in US history was filed by Lehman Brothers Holdings in New York, exposing
a whole raft of critical failures in global financial regulation, corporate governance, and risk management.