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Friday 6 November 2009

RBS Losses and Bonuses

Royal Bank of Scotland today announced another huge loss on its overall activities. No surprise there!

It is equally unsurprising that RBS claims to have billions of pounds in funds allocable - and allocated - to SMEs that are not taking up the loans they have been offered. They do not add the truism that this is because the terms are too onerous. The banks have access to incredibly cheap money: but they screw their customers in the hope of rebuilding their balance sheets quickly. Quite rightly, the customers who have survived - in the main - are telling the bankers where to stack their funds.

The Corporate Banking area continues to produce disastrous results of Goodwin-era excess.

The Casino Banking operation is bringing in oodles of lovely profit; but the owner, the government, has told RBS that it cannot pay the going rate for the traders' high-pressure activity. It is expected that when this is confirmed - people in that world cannot yet believe that they may not be paid the top slice of the cream that they generate in their cyberspatial transactions of ephemera - they will resign. The speed with which the resignees will get equivalent jobs elsewhere will be an interesting indicator of the real degree of vitality in the City casino: and that will be the one really useful piece of information to emerge from the RBS Group results.

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