Right Bloody Scandal?

  

The bailout of the banking sector was at best a mess and at worse a scandal, with no obvious or clear winners to date. The periodic update of the financial positions of the banks we have a stake in does little to create confidence.

 

Enter stage right……‘Our’ Royal Bank of Scotland has reported a £968 million loss for the first quarter of 2016. Just to ensure a couple of points are put into perspective for you:

 

1.   By the word ‘our’ I refer to our 73% public ownership of the bank.

 

2.   The £968 million loss was double the loss in the same period of 2015.

 

So all not looking good then? Well, that’s the theme that the press / media are running with. But scratch beneath the surface and take a ‘glass half full’ approach and actually……

 

3.   The losses included a one-off dividend payment of £1.2 billion to the UK Government to allow dividend payments to shareholders in the future. Or to put that another way……it would have posted a profit of £225 million.

 

We could (and I have) debated on whether it would have been more financially beneficial to have let RBS fail......but there do appear to be green shoots of recovery for the bank, which in turn means a financial return for the UK public purse.

 

So the big question remains, is the Royal Bank of Scotland glass ‘half full’ or ‘half empty’.