Wednesday 21 January 2009

RBS - the problem

It is too big to fail, and extremely expensive to save.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

What are those assets, exactly?

roym said...

fred goodwin and tom mckillop should be swinging from lamposts

deepian said...

Presumably RBS has equally large liabilities, and much of that is owned to foreign financial institutions. How much of the "assets" are toxic CDOs etc? Is the UK government not indirectly propping up foreign (i.e. U.S.) institutions which created the global financial meltdown in the first place?

No bank is too big to fail. Let them all fail, and get it over with. The government should bail out the people - those who have saved - and not the bankers and spendthrifts who have got us all into this mess... but its not going to happen that way is it?

Anonymous said...

RBS, Bank of Scotland (now HBOS) and Clydesdale bank all print their own banknotes.

Fred said...

The killer question is what blend of currencies this stuff is represented in.

It is entirely probable that whatever happens to sterling: a wheel or two will fall off the bus.

Low sterling will probably impact RBS because of borrowings in dollars (the worlds reserve currency).

High sterling would cripple manufacturing and exports which could be the ultimate way forward.

The mistake was rescuing LTCM; and now the moral hazard is coming home to roost.

Anonymous said...

On the matter of banknote printing, I understand that the Scots banks have to deposit a sum equivalent to the bulk of their banknote face values with the B of E in order to print them. So its not like they print them on their own as it were.

Anyway, and to the point. Can we not recover at least some of the bonus money the bankers have paid themselves these past few years under the Proceeds of Crime Act? Clearly there has been fraud here on a massive scale. They should be prosecuted and fined the bonus money.

powerman said...

Why are these kinds of comparisons so often made between the assets of a troubled bank and the revenue stream (GDP) of an economy.

Comparing assets of a company to revenue stream of a country seems odd.

Anonymous said...

UK GDP is counted from increasing debt, as debt ceases to increase, GDP will disappear.
Accordingly, the size of RBS "assets" relative to UK GDP will increase in the future, which would lead rather neatly to the impossibility of the UK bailing out RBS.

Anonymous said...

Anon at 20:32, exactly what "fraud" do you think has been perpetrated? I mean actual legal fraud not "all bankers are wankers" "fraud".