HBOS, the marriage of Bank of Scotland and Halifax, was launched on a sparkling summer's day in 2001 amid the chandeliered splendour of London's Chancery Court Hotel.
Seven years later, HBOS's shareholders yesterday voted for the bank to shuffle o
ff the mortal coil of its independence in an altogether more industrial, leaden-skied, wintry Birmingham.
It is somehow fitting. After the collapse of the banking industry since the summer of subprime – 2007 – it has become a much more blue-collar sector.
Banks won't lend to each other. Products associated with acronyms – CDOs, SIVs, Ninjas etc – have fallen badly out of fashion because they are associated with the opaque bank lending madness that got us all into this mess in the first place down California-way.
Instead, it is said the new HBOS-enhanced (some time since that phrase was used) Lloyds Banking Group will focus more on the knitting.
It will be helped in this by dominant shares in crucial areas like current accounts, mortgages, and small and medium-sized business lending.
Nobody can dispute it has been a rollercoaster ride. Even the first day's trading of HBOS's shares was momentous: it coincided with 9/11.
But there were swift sunlit years for HBOS as well, steadily making billions of pounds worth of profits.
The bank overtook Lloyds TSB as Britain's fourth most profitable bank (ironic, given the course of events, even if it somewhat undermined HBOS's 'Taking on the Big Four' marketing campaigns at the time).
A key element of the logic of the merger of BoS with Halifax was the Scottish bank had a much-admired corporate lending expertise, and not just in its Scottish heartland. However, it needed more capital to keep up the pace.
Halifax's massive depositor base, the biggest in the UK, would help provide it. When HBOS's corporate banking arm then threw off good-margin capital (retail billionaire Sir Peter Green was one of division head Peter Cummings's best buddies) that could then be ploughed back into the wider bank.
And it worked perfectly for a while. But trouble was in the wings. Gradually, HBOS needed to turn more to the wholesale funding markets to keep the steam going at BoS corporate. Retail deposits were just not enough propellant.
And the corporate arm started investing heavily in real estate and other sectors, taking equity stakes as well as providing big loans.
Then, out of left-field, Bam! When the wholesale markets froze up, Northern Rock was the immediate casualty.
But while Northern was much more exposed to this arena than HBOS, it must have caused a flutter in the latter as well. Was it the first letters of the writing on the wall?
It proved to be. HBOS's investments in property were swamped. And its greater exposure than any competitor to a UK mortgage market under water following Northern Rock et al put the lid on things.
Yesterday's vote was sad, but, dispassionately, its short seven-year history has been a sad mixture of good performance, flawed judgment and bad luck.
IT IS a truism that, even in economic calamity, governments are unlikely to switch the lights off. Nothing does more to foster instability than a population which has suffered such a profound drop in the standard of living, writes Hamish Rutherford.
That was the underlying message from Rupert Soames, the chief executive of Aggreko, the world's leading provider of temporary power yesterday. He urged caution, predicting that while the firm was trading better than even it expected, it could only defy the economic trends for so long.
A recession in Europe and North America should hit Aggreko's industrial clients. But so far, even Aggreko's business with manufactures in established markets was holding up OK. In times of uncertainty, it seems, a cheaper temporary solution is preferable to investing in the required infrastructure.
Few companies have warned the City in recent months that their expectations are too low, as Aggreko did yesterday, warning pre-tax profits were likely to be around £2 million more than analysts are forecasting. By Aggreko's recent standards this out performance is negligible.
Aggreko is not immune to economic head winds but many of its clients, including governments, may decide the cost of no power is simply too high.
The full article contains 724 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
