Thursday, 24 February 2011

Taxpayers nearly there in RBS

Well the wind is finally blowing a little behind the great taxpayer owned Bank of RBS. The bank has announced its full year results today and is still loss-making; but well on the way to recovery.

Some key points for us taxpayers are that it is making good progress on reducing its interbank lending, good progress on selling off Non Core assets and is profitable in its main remaining businesses (ex-Insurance which it is going to sell).

To come too are the sale of the Insurance business and the close of the deal to sell 300 branches to Santander.

Whilst Ulster losses have accelerated and impairments on loans remain steady rather than falling, all is not perfect in RBS world. Also to make profits the bank is piling into Resi mortgage lending, which is very profitable at the moment and helps the image as there is a perception in the market of a lack of mortgage finance (the price of it is another issue....).

The big outlier is the cost of the Government APS Insurance, the £1.1 billion of this (which is taxpayer profit in effect) is quite a hit to the balance sheet. No doubt management is considering a way to get out of this but in choppy markets it may not be able to do so.

Now the Government can relax a little in knowing that given another year, RBS is going to make a profit and will have finally turned the corner. At that point the Government can start selling down its position as owner; hopefully via public offering, but I somehow think the profit of selling to Qatari's will trump this people power proposition.

4 comments:

Bill Quango MP said...

Fury on LBC today as banker bonuses = balance sheet losses.

1st caller wanted to nationalise the banks. Kevin Maguire pointed out they were.{RBS}
Caller then said 'but government doesn't run them.'

Thank goodness for that.

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Timbo614 said...

@BQ - sounds about right for GovBank

[Aside]
Many years ago (when I was young & foolish and interest rates were circa 15%) I was going to put Ads in the local paper reading "Special Offer" £100.00 - TODAY ONLY £99.00. (Please allow 6 weeks for delivery...)

:)

Anonymous said...

Public offering? Would that (naively) be like selling me something I already own...?

Pogo said...

I find myself largely in agreement with "anon" at 09:13. On which basis, seeing as the taxpayer "funded" the share flotations, it would seem reasonable to distribute them to said tapayers.

Assuming that there are approx 30 million taxpayers in the UK, the RBS holding of 39,644,835,194 shares equates to approx 1,320 per taxpayer. Lloyds holding is 27,608,563,642 giving 920 per...

It'd be an administrative nightmare though! :-)