Crikey. 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...

Scotland, and Edinburgh in particular, has a world class financial services industry, in banking, insurance and fund management. 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...

BP's financial recovery from the disaster of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 is being put in jeopardy by the escalating amounts being paid to businesses in the Gulf of Mexico region to compensate them for economic harm. 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...

Will the UK's financial regulators be cripplingly embarrassed by the Co-op's financial woes? 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...

For the wider Co-op group or movement, banking is turning into a hideously expensive business. 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...

A couple of seemingly bad things have happened at the Co-operative bank in the past 12 hours. Its credit rating has been downgraded by Moody's to "not prime" (a euphemism for junk) and its 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...

I blithely write that we as taxpayers own Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds - or rather the state controls 81% and 39% of these recuperating banks respectively. 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....

With unemployment among 18 to 24 year-olds nudging a million, and all manner of statistics showing that social mobility is neither what it was nor what it should be (arguably), the question of how young people secure company internships and work experience has become a resonant one. 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...

Naturally most coverage of Lord Lawson's euro-Damascene moment in the Times has focussed on who he is - one of the two most influential chancellors of modern times - rather than what he says. 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...

Royal Bank of Scotland, the giant ailing bank 82% owned by taxpayers, is on the mend - if not quite mended. 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...