UK banks in freefall after second bailout

The RBS has been so stupid. Pride has got them to the position they are in to now. The consortium of RBS, Banco Santander and Fortis had to buy the Dutch bank ABN-Amro so badly that they paid a price which was far too high. All to avoid a merger between Barclays and ABN.

Now they have written off (if this is the correct english word) 22 billion of the 25 billion share that RBS paid for the ABN assets. Additionally, Fortis has been nationalized. It's currently being speculated that the Dutch state might buy the RBS's share in ABN-Amro and give it back to ABN itself.

And the shorting ban expired friday... with all those short sellers rushing to make money sure didn't help.

Is there any FAZ equivalent in the UK markets? Meaning 3XUltra Shorts of UK financials?

It's too late now, but eh.

reply to post by TreX-UK


anyone supprised?
the ignorant fools throw money away like it grows on Trees
they spend millions on Crap expecting to rake in millions more (other peoples debts)

they pay their people retarded wages which are shocking

they screw their customers over

funny how Brown is willing to give banks billions of pounds 300+
to lend to small and large busnises,
would be better of giving the money to the busnieses insted of trying to route it through the banks, atleast then it goes where it is needed and not wasted by the banks.

little note to anyone saying that this is only affecting the banks - the euro markets are red across the board and dropping fast.

This isn't going to be something that the markets just shrug off, if we're lucky we're going to see a new round of collapses within the banking sector then some major stock pools going under and then various companies with money tied up in it all falling - this will help speed the impending real doom, when nations start attacking each other economicly, anti-terror legislation used like it was against iceland, etc.

The big question, who won't be able to pay police and firemens wages first? England or California?

oh and yeah we're taxed highly but the british gov is WELL in the red, we can't afford this -heh, we can't even afford the olympics at the mo. Something seriously major is going to have to happen in the next few years or we're going to have to default on payments -what shall we get rid of first, our oil? electricity? food? we import almost everything that is vital to our modern life and if we don't have any cash to hand we won't be able to do this, we've been earning all our money via the service sector, patents (mainly arms) and of course the main arm of our national earnings comes from our economic dominance of the world of finance - lloyds of london, etc. If the city is no longer the economic center of the world we won't be able to keep control of the service sector and should the nature of the global game shift we could lose global control of our copyrights too - good bye rule britannia,

Dow CFD's are off a tad but no biggie. They gapped up a hundred points and have fallen a couple hundred since. That's not much movement nowadays

Wow it doesn't look good, this is a rather dire outlook from the daily mail on the current situation. People should be worried about the whole country going belly up, not on weather they lost a couple of grand on the stock market.
I mean who's going to suffer first and most, does not look good at all.

Wonder how the US markets will react to this, they aren't on today.

We’re a nation on the brink of going bankrupt
The consequences of this failure are grim indeed. Britain now faces, for the first time in history, the prospect of national bankruptcy.

Consider the following terrifying facts. Our national debt officially stands at approximately £400billion – in itself a frighteningly high figure

However, that £400billion is minute compared with the collective indebtedness of the banks which are now under effective government control.
Let's take the case of just one – the RBS group, whose two principal assets are Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest. RBS has outstanding loans and other assets amounting to an eye-watering two trillion pounds. That's five times the size of the national debt.

Already the taxpayer owns a whopping 58 per cent of RBS thanks to last autumn's bail-out.
Admittedly nations do not actually go into liquidation when they go bankrupt. But the process is every bit as humiliating and would certainly cost millions of jobs, and mean a huge drop in the living standards for every single one of us.

National bankruptcy occurs when the national debt grows so large that investors believe it can never be repaid. At that point they go on strike.

Two things then happen. The currency collapses. That is already starting to happen with sterling, precisely because of growing international fears about the solvency of the British state.

And the government starts to print money. Unable to borrow money in the form of loans to pay off the national deficit, it orders the central bank to create it. This was the tactic resorted to when Germany went bust in the early 1920s, and by Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

source

I do not know about the U.K, But I do not buy for a minute that the Governments did not know this crash was coming!
It has been hidden from the people while they tried to cover it up. Or fix it.

This will not be fixed with money. The markets will have to bottom out and start up again just like it did in the 30's, and that is what we are seeing.

Also I think that the RBS information was released today as the U.S markets where closed. This gives them time to construct a story and to try to keep our markets from coming down. It will not work.

We on both sides of the pond are going to have to get as ready as we can because as I see it every time they say it is ok and we have this under control we get another blast of bad new's. And like others I do not see how they are going to keep all the company's open.

There is just not enough money anywhere to pay all of this and pay back what has been taken.

reply to post by Vitchilo


FXP is a 2X Bear ETF for the UK Financials.

This doesn't surprise me at all. Like I said last time round, bailing out these banks is the last thing you should be doing. It's crazy, it's like bailing out Al Capone and hoping and praying he's goes on the straight and narrow. Surely this has to be illegal, not to mention criminal
expecting the tax payers to foot the bill.

A concerned citizen tells it exactly how it is under New Labour
Time for Bank bosses and greedy bankers generally to have their salaries divided by 10 or more, and to pay back their outrageous bonuses. That'd cull a few Billions for the Treasury. WHEN IS GORDON GOING TO ACT INSTEAD OF ALLOWING THEM ALL TO GET AWAY WITH IT? When will some bankers end up in prison for gambling with OUR money. When will we get a Govt that KNOWS how to run a country.

www.dailymail.co.uk...

www.dailymail.co.uk...

This government has only one goal and that is to leave us all a broken people and a broken country. Just ripe for plucking and to force our assimilation into the fascist EU, which has been the plan all along.

The travesty continues - Written off, an oligarch's £2.5bn
The taxpayer has been forced to write off a £2.5billion loan from Royal Bank of Scotland to a Russian oligarch.

London-based billionaire Leonid Blavatnik owns the chemical giant LyondellBasell, which is on the verge of collapse. Gordon Brown was said to be furious after Treasury officials found details of the loan in RBS's books. The money was lent to 51-year-old Mr Blavatnik by the Dutch bank ABN Amro, which was taken over by RBS when Sir Fred Goodwin was chief executive. He was forced to quit in October after claims that his reckless expansion strategy was responsible for bringing RBS to its knees.

Russian-born Mr Blavatnik splits his time between New York and his £41million home in Kensington, West London. This month, it was announced that LyondellBasell was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy with £18billion debts. A collapse in demand for chemicals has left the company struggling to service

www.dailymail.co.uk...

Scratches head Why are taxpayers footing the bill for the loan he made. His company can go bust for all I care. Ain't my problem and how is this legal We will be bailing out Jaguar, MFI and Wooly's at this rate.

And just when you think things can't get any worse the New Labour parasites turn the screw. More EU legislation.

Pay-as-you-throw taxes approved for WHOLE country... without MPs' vote.

Powers which allow the Government to impose bin taxes on the whole country without consulting Parliament have been brought in by stealth.

A little-noticed clause in the Climate Change Act means all councils are free to adopt charges of up to £100 - without MPs voting on the issue first.

The Conservatives said the revelation was an 'outrage'.

They likened it to ship money, the tax levied by Charles I without the consent of Parliament - one of the causes of the English Civil War.

This week sees the deadline for councils bidding to run the first payasyou-throw pilot schemes.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs confirmed that powers in the clause will allow any pilot scheme to be implemented across every council in England by ministerial order.

Scratches head again - why are we paying council tax.

www.dailymail.co.uk...

I bet these parasite MP's will no doubt have a bin allowance where they can claim back any pay as you throw expenses, unlike the rest of us...





[edit on 19-1-2009 by kindred]

I think the short selling played a big part in todays fall, its all most criminal what these bankers do, playing with OUR money the TAX payers money, ya these guys pay a little tax but they know the system so well they find ever loophole..Hell they probley created the loop holes for them selvs

I think Depreasion is really on the cards now, we cant draw to much from the 1929-1932 as its a complety diffrent ball game, but it will follow the same patten of war to boom again.



......just seems to be in our nature all the greed and war

reply to post by kindred


but that is from the daily hate mail tho ...dont draw to much from them lol,

but i do see what you mean

that was my Anoymous post below

For anyone who wants to know what's going on... A few months ago here in the US Colin Powell, Biden and several others "In the know", not to mention a few other global leaders, referred to an "International crisis" that would face Obama on the 20th or 21st. Biden even went so far as to state that the people would need to "Support Obama, because it won't be readily evident that [they're] right" refering to what they intend to do about the crisis.

Well, this is it... this IS "THE CRISIS". The beginning of the end of fiat currency. Already today Obama has called for Nationalized Bank - which is totally strange since I went to find one of the many articles I read earlier today and they are all scrubbed . I had read similar rumblings in the UK.

Sounds to me like a Nationalized Bank is the first step toward a total autocratic society controlled by the government and it's "Citizens" become wards of the state; or "Chattal". I suspect that once a run on the banks begin and their shares trade down to junk status, there will be a need to declare a bank emergency and have the banking system taken over by the government. In this case, 1 + 1 = 2.

I have a hunch that this whole power-play is NOT going to work. I think this last ditch effort is going to be the final nail and cause the whole system to unwind- really, REALLY fast!!!

reply to post by kozmo


you could have a point, if the DOW collapses tomorrow then people are going to be saying THIS is the thing, im not so sure but it could be,

It happened today for a reason, dates are set long in advance for releasing reports, etc so maybe they knew tey guessed these would be the reports that show its 10x worse than the doom sayers say.

Then again i still go with it being a turn of speach, i.e. from day one obama will be tested by everyone.

The thing with economics is its very slow moving, you can watch the inevitable collapse of things but are unable to do anything -this slow crumble as the weight shifts from one pillar to another slowly crushing them as the doom speeds up. Maybe they could tell this would be a time that a leg would collapse, maybe they have planned it like this, then again maybe tomorrow they'll project Jesus on the moon who knows.

A few snips from one of the more responsible econ-bloggers. Fwiw, I know Jesse to be one of the more stable, conservative, and well researched economists on the front...not given to fits of hysteria, rants, or fear mongering.

The TARP oversight investigation was just stalled by order the pres...a pork-filled stimulus plan is heading for the Senate bog.......good old fashioned partisan politics...business as usual? With every bank closure, each financial write-down, and every new failed credit facility, I can't escape the feeling of marking time. While Washington fumbles on, I harbor my own suspicions. Something is missing, but what exactly are we not being told here?

31 January 2009
Notes from Underground

This is a composite of chatter and 'gossip' and anecdotes picked up on the grapevine from multiple sources, some that could be considered reasonably informed.

Treat it as rumour and hearsay none of it can be guaranteed authenticity, and second hand information is what it is. More of it is coming from Europe than the US, which seems odd.

There was more of a struggle in deciding to allow the more speculative portion of this out than you might imagine.

****
It seems as if the government is downplaying the seriousness of the situation a bit while they work to find a way forward.

****
There is an air of quiet desperation as the situation grows progressively worse, and there is intense debate on when and how to break it to the public. They are not even sure what exactly to break because the situation is so fluid. No one wishes to be the messenger and possibly be blamed for inciting a loss of confidence.

****
There are rumours swirling that there will be a bank holiday in the UK, and they will be particularly hard pressed because of the high percentage of their GDP that financial services represent. The pound is heading to parity with the dollar. The good news is that it will probably not be as bad as Iceland.

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[edit on 31-1-2009 by OBE1]