Nevermind that the Bank of England kept secret for a year its massive loan to HBoS and RBS (LON:RBS), why on earth did it choose to break its silence on the day Lloyds Banking Group (LON:LLOY) announces its record rights issue?
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If banks shouldn’t be “too big to fail” how small must they be before we allow them to collapse? It’s the question the Bank of England’s governor must answer.
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“Is it time for a new windfall tax on banks?” asked this blog back in the summer. It seems so. The Westminster press briefing is that the chancellor is considering a banks tax in his pre-budget statement.
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Capitalists might not like to hear this. But it looks like the biggest ever experiment in Keynesian economics might just have worked.
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Have we made chairing a company so hard that seats cannot be filled? There are vacancies in the centre of more than half a dozen big boardrooms but the headhunters don’t have that many names on their lists.
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If 164 Lloyds TSB bank branches were being closed it would hardly be headline news. Axing the whole Cheltenham & Gloucester chain has attracted undue attention, but there would be no point in the HBoS merger if there is not rationalisation. (See LON:LLOY).
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Nevermind whether the government wanted Sir Victor Blank to chair Lloyds Banking Group; why would he want to head a nationalised industry?
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ABNAmro and HBoS have both brought down the banks that bought them but they are completely different. Royal Bank of Scotland’s mistake was to overpay for a good bank; Lloyds’ error was to buy a lousy bank.
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There are arguments for banks paying bonuses – but there are better ones for them not paying. In defending bonus payments the banks show that they just haven’t realized how dire their situation is.
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Critics of Lloyds’s takeover of HBoS seem to think that without the merger HBoS would have no problems. Wrong. It would have all the problems and be either bust or nationalised.
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