AMID CHAOS-FUELLED talk of the end of Western economic hegemony, the implications for Scotland - a low-priority subject for anyone but ourselves - will take time to become clear.

It is already clear that it will take some ingenuity to present this crisis as an opportunity, but that is what leaders have to do.

In a week of market carnage, much-exacerbated by the taxpayer-funded BBC, the spectacle of our two biggest companies, HBOS and RBS, chasing each other to the very bottom of the FTSE 100's performance league has been a nightmarish one.

Given their centrality to Scotland's fragile economy, not to mention the freight of national prestige they carry, this really matters.

As we head into a recession predicted to be worse than that of the 1990s, it is a grim coincidence for this small pond that its two biggest fish should, in unconnected ways, have sacrificed themselves to the false god of market share: one through over-trading, the other through over-acquiring.

One of the worst aspects of the era of collective madness from which markets - and commentators - are now guiltily awakening has been the divorcing of actions from consequences, or performance from rewards.

That Scotland, which rose to economic and industrial greatness on a diet of that kind of moralising, should produce two of the most blatant examples of the rewards-for-failure (or at least no-sanctions-for-failure) culture is another disorienting fact.

Yet for every rumour that the departure of bank bosses is being delayed only by haggling over dismissal terms, there is a City bank analyst or a shareholder insisting that they should stay rather than risk a chaotic change of leadership.

Gordon Brown has correctly sensed that there is political advantage in ramping up the rhetoric against the performance-reward anomaly. But even with the new spirit of interventionism in the air, there is little that governments can do about it.

Life is not fair - luckily for Sir Fred Goodwin and Andy Hornby - and even the shocks of last week are not going to change that. In fact, we can expect to see that harsh fact reinforced with a vengeance as the consequences of financial meltdown and recession fan out to punish the innocent: the suddenly unemployed parent; the young or old victim of council service cutbacks; the hard-working but bankrupt small business boss.

On a different plane, the SNP are entitled to feel themselves victims of this disaster.The momentum and intellectual conviction that the Nationalist administration had managed to build in the eyes of business, partly through its own ingenuity and energy, partly through the ineffectiveness and cynicism of its Labour and Liberal Democrat predecessors, cannot survive intact the devastation of what wags are now calling the arc of insolvency (Iceland and Ireland).

Closer to home, the obvious confusion of the party's leadership as to how to respond to the banking crisis exposes weaknesses in the case for a viable independent Scotland. Dispassionate City observers have a lowish opinion of Alex Salmond's understanding of the banking sector, as evidenced by the recent crisis. This matters because no political party in the UK has ever had a hope of achieving its goals by running against the City of London, and there is no reason why the SNP should be an exception.

Now the model for independence all comes down to oil and the Norwegian example. So far that country - to be visited by enterprise minister Jim Mather this week - is bearing up relatively well, but its position outside of the currently stricken EU makes it another confusing exemplar for the pro-European SNP.

And of course, the situation that has prompted the Scottish government's predicament on banking should not be glossed over. For the first time in three centuries Scotland effectively no longer has an independent banking sector. How can that fact not transform the political landscape? It makes the SNP Cabinet's steadfast support for the leaders of the banks even more surprising.

Labour leader Iain Gray scored in parliament last week by quoting Keynes at the first minister: "When the facts change I change my mind: What do you do Sir?" The question deserves an answer.

What happens next? The banks are required next week to start fulfilling their obligation to the government, and announce how they intend to raise capital by the end of the year. The big question of whether they can raise it through the markets. HBOS - no longer in control of its own destiny - along with Lloyds TSB and RBS will probably struggle to do that.

If they can't raise it through the market, they will raise it through the government's scheme, by which they inject preference shares or ordinary equity with strings attached. As well as an obligation to lend more into the economy - an unappetising prospect in a recession - those strings involve strict controls on the dividend policy and looking at "executive compensation".

This ritual clipping of the fat cats' claws will no doubt be performed to the accompaniment of crowd-pleasing homilies by Gordon Brown, the man who presided over the orgy of leverage now ended and whose political salvation through the misery of others has added insult to the injury of this real crisis.