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The announcement of 2300 job losses from the Royal Bank of Scotland, spread around the UK, is only the start of the financial job losses we can expect over the coming months and years, though I can offer a tiny hint of Scottish silver lining to a very large economic storm cloud.

Underlying the unemployment figures out this morning, is the spread of the recession from construction and property through retail and into every sector of the economy.

But despite banks having been the catalyst for much of this downturn, they have been slow to shed staff, at least outside London.

Now, they are starting to do so, both to slash at their costs because their balance sheets are in such a bad shape, and because less money flowing through the economy means less business and fewer transactions for their staff to process.

The word from Gogarburn, the Edinburgh global headquarters of the Royal Bank of Scotland, is that there will be more news of that later this month when the bank publishes its annual report.

It will also make clear how it intends to shed parts of the business that are under-performing or seen as at the fringes of their target markets - while admitting that around 15% of its assets identified for disposal may have to stay onboard for a year or so while there are so few buyers in the marketplace and prices are so low.

Don't expect the employment news to come in a raw headcount of thousands of jobs.

More likely are cost cutting targets for each of the bank's divisions, with managers then required to figure out how best to implement them.

But the ballpark figures go like this...

The Royal Bank employs nearly 180,000 people throughout the world. Of them, 106,000 work in the UK, and more than 15,000 are in Scotland.

The likely scale of cost cutting is expected to range between 10% and 20%.

Apply that to the staff numbers, and you could see between 10,000 and 20,000 UK workers losing their jobs - or, according to Unite, the trade union, paying the price for management mistakes.

Will it affect Scotland particularly harshly, as it has the headquarters operation and Edinburgh has a high number of banking jobs?

For Scots, that's where the sliver of silver lining is, because the answer is: not necessarily.

The Scottish elements of the bank tend to be those that are core to what it does, and does well. Scottish staffing looks like being let off relatively lightly.

The more exotic end of its investment banking has been done in London and New York, and that's where the financial job losses are already hurting.

It is worth noting, amid all the rows about bonuses and in the face of an expected £28bn loss, that much of the Royal Bank had a pretty successful year last year.

Most of the damage was done in a global markets division that has perhaps as few as 500 managers and traders working in it.

That said, even at the most optimistic out-turn from these ballpark figures, RBS staff in Scotland should be bracing for at least 1500 job losses over the target turnaround period of three to five years.

The pessimistic figure is around 3000, and that's without knowing how deep the recession is going to be.