Thursday 26 February 2009

RBS - the loss of the century

Only the century? This is the biggest loss in UK corporate history.

Now it is time for the UK taxpayer to suck it up. However, I hope no one is going to start complaining. We brought this upon ourselves. This is judgement, my friends; righteous judgement for transgressions committed in the past.

We allowed RBS to run wild; we talked up the housing market; we believed it all and it all proved false. House prices do not keep on rising for ever, and loans must be repaid.

My only hope is that we might learn something from this sorry mess.

4 comments:

deepian said...

I am complaining! There is nothing "righteous" about the government's craven and idiotic attempts to p=rop up the banking system - I can only assume that someone has a gun to their heads, or else is lining their pockets, because, as you have already pointed out in previous posts, the banks are much bigger than the government in scale - attempting to prop them up WILL bankrupt the country. Taxpayers are not on the hook for this - taxpayers cannot pay for this, we are to broke - so the government will simply print money and debase the currency, including the savings of those of us who have been prudent with our finances all along. This is a case of the poor being held to ransom to prop up the rich, once again, which seems to have become a recurring theme of modern politics.

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately, the capitalist greed that drives most of the UK population and visitors is the very thing that will be our undoing. In the current situation, all that will happen is this attitude will be concentrated into more aggressive forms.

Our politicians are lining their own pockets, civil servants the same. It is the private individual that does not work for the state that will suffer for many years to come.

The greed that the UK people allowed themselves to be caught up in will be forever remembered as the downfall of a great nation, and the people have no-one to blame but themselves - for being the sole cause of it, and for not standing up to a bloated, self-serving government.

AntiCitizenOne said...

Maybe we should learn not to bail out banks?

How much would it have cost to just repay GBP depositors?

Anonymous said...

Not being a politician, a regulator, a business reporter or - worst of all - a banker, I couldn't disagree more with the "we" bit of this post. Society is not to blame.

I am not trained in law or economics and like 99.999% of the public I did nothing more than watch in horror as the whole sorry mess slowly unfolds. Watching a train wreck from the sidelines doesnt make you responsible for it, *especially* if you've spent the last 5 or so years boring friends and relations silly that something like this was bound to come.