It may be rebuilding inside the walls, but RBS is still under siege

The most troubling, no matter how much it is played down by some at the bank, is the possibility of Scotland, RBS’s home, seceding from its biggest market, the UK, within two years.

Elsewhere, penalties for mis-selling and rate-rigging continue to dog the entire industry, and regulatory requirements have become far stricter than ever imagined five years ago.

Mr McEwan has presented a clear message about what kind of bank he wants RBS to become – one that taxpayers, if they must hold on to it for several years more, they can be proud of owning.

Behind the scenes, good work is being done: a flotation of its US bank, Citizens, is on track for the end of the year, which will provide much-needed financial buffers. RBS has promised to improve its lending to small businesses, and many of the practices that confused customers in its retail bank have been thrown out. A clear trajectory has been established.

However, as the walls of Gogarburn testify, its inglorious history will remain part of its DNA for several years yet.

Land Secs puts Britain in shop window

Bluewater shopping centre may seem an unlikely candidate for promoting Britain overseas. After all, apart from die-hard shoppers, who really wants to spend their day there battling past thousands of people moving from store to store?

But that is not the way Land Securities, Britain’s biggest listed property company, sees it. It has just paid £656m for a 30pc stake in Bluewater. To put that price into context, it represents a yield – which measures annual rental income against the capital value of the property asset – of just over 4pc.

Those sort of yields are usually only seen on ultra-prime property in London’s West End, where luxury retailers are prepared to pay ludicrous amounts of rent to secure a pitch in Bond Street. In a few years, this deal might be seen as the property cycle turning point. It could be confirmation that Britain was in a bubble.

But Land Securities, led by the prudent Rob Noel, beat competition from rival British Land and sovereign wealth funds to secure the stake. This is because it sees the shopping centre as part of a wider strategy. To put it simply, Land Securities wants a shiny shopping centre close to London that it can use to attract new retailers and retail concepts to Britain.

The rise of internet shopping and the evolution of the high street means it is more important than ever for landlords to attract new businesses. But when Land Securities tries to woo a foreign retailer at the moment it has no prime retail asset in the South East to show them. The Bridges in Sunderland or Lewisham Shopping Centre don’t really cut it. Bluewater, on the other hand, is perfect. It is one of the most lucrative locations in the UK for retailers. This is because of it being close to London, affluent Kent, and its solid transport links.

British retailers regularly use Bluewater to test their latest store concepts. Within the past year, Dixons and Marks & Spencer have tested new stores at Bluewater that they are now rolling out across the country. Therefore, the Kent centre provides Land Securities with a valuable opportunity to build stronger relationships with the world’s leading retailers. This allows the property company to then invite the retailers to try out its other shopping centres in the UK, such as Trinity in Leeds.

Retail landlords never used to think with such a joined-up strategy. But the pressure on bricks-and-mortar retailing and the arrival of Westfield have changed the rules. There is a smack of desperation by Land Securities in all of this, a sense that Bluewater was its only chance to secure a prime retail centre in the South East. Given the success of Westfield London and Westfield Stratford City, this is probably true.

But this same success also poses an awkward question for Land Securities. Are Bluewater’s best days already behind it?

The revision that America really needs

What a difference a revision makes.

When the US Commerce Department published its early estimates for America’s first quarter gross domestic product, investors were rattled. They had been expecting a slowdown from the 4.1pc-a-year expansion of the third quarter of 2013, but not the near-standstill that the April numbers demonstrated.

The department estimated that the world’s largest economy had only grown at the equivalent of 0.1pc a year during the first quarter, denting faith in the robustness of America’s recovery. How positive that news now seems in retrospect. Over the past two months, Commerce has revised that figure sharply downwards twice, finally concluding that the US economy shrank by a startling 2.9pc.

Newly available data show that consumer spending and exports were both considerably weaker than first thought.

This leaves us to draw two conclusions: the first is that America’s economic revival is on shakier ground than even pessimistic experts forecast. The second is that we simply should not hold much store by early GDP estimates.

Arguably there is also a third conclusion: that the Commerce Department’s methodology is out of date, and urgently needs revising.

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