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As with Edinburgh's troubled tramworks, the capital's burghers are wondering if bosses at their two biggest banks are ever going to get beyond digging very deep holes and staring into them.

They don't seem to have learned the first maxim of hole-digging: stop. It's partly that they haven't known how far they have to descend to reach the source of their toxic troubles. It's partly that they've been in a state of corporate shock.

With their annual results out this week, this won't be when they fill in the holes. The best we can hope is for the plans to do so.

To set expectations low and get more attention for their recovery proposals, both of them already put their humungously large losses into the public domain.

Next Friday, it's the turn of Lloyds Banking Group, which has taken on Halifax Bank of Scotland and got a nasty shock when, belatedly, Lloyds accountants examined the books in detail. Last year's loss for HBOS looks like £10bn, or £11bn, depending how you count it. What's a billion between bankers?

Chief executive Eric Daniels can be expected to lay out his plans for integrating Lloyds TSB with HBOS, cutting £1.5bn from his annual cost base within five years. With obvious overlap of branches and divisions, assume big job losses. Staff on both sides of this controversial merger are approaching Friday with trepidation.

We should also begin to find out the Lloyds' approach to the Bank of Scotland's corporate division, after it contributed £7bn of woe to last year's figures. That comes close to home for a lot of Scottish businesses, its leading entrepreneurs, its football clubs - which have become closely entwined with HBOS's now notoriously liberal lending and investment policy. How fast will that unwind?

With its results out on Thursday, the jobs picture at the Royal Bank looks slightly less bleak. New chief executive Stephen Hester has fewer overlaps. And because his Scottish staff do the less exotic stuff at competitive costs, they're more likely to be retained as core. The global markets division, which did the most damage, will get a dramatic and probably painful makeover. Insurance businesses, including Direct Line and Churchill, look the safest place to be, as they're seen as the most efficient already.

While the core will keep RBS in the world's major financial centres, the non-core bit will strip out those parts at the margins and place them in a very large corporate bargain basement.

That will probably represent, very roughly, a quarter of the trillion-plus pounds of assets on the bank's balance sheet. That will also include much of the toxic debt that the Government has been struggling to find a way to insure.

This radical restructuring means that as much as £300bn of RBS business will soon be on the market. Expect that to include Asian bits of its Dutch acquisition, ABN Amro, which are surplus to requirements. And while it will keep its core American assets, Citizens and Greenwich Capital, parts of them will be available for offers.

But don't expect rapid sales, as there aren't a whole lot of buyers out there. The RBS recovery plan is scheduled to take three to five years, which may make some investors impatient. It depends how fast the broader economy gets through its current turbulence.

The main investor will have to be very patient. That's you, me and Chancellor Alistair Darling. And as RBS headquarters borders his Edinburgh constituency, the HQ is as secure as anything on these financial quicksands - just so long as it doesn't fall into the tramworks.