£66bn the taxpayer is unlikely to see again...bank bailouts

chewmylegoff

grizzly1911 wrote: »

Truthful accounting would show it as a contingent liability or a doubtful debt - so I guess we will never see it.;)

truthful accounting would show it as a loss (i.e. the shares are held as an investment so would be marked to market).

chewmylegoff

sabretoothtigger wrote: »

Inflation is not profitable, share prices will rise I agree but its not going to make us any richer unfortunately.

that was my point really. but in those circumstances the govt would claim it had made a profit by saying that it had sold the shares for more than it paid, ignoring the fact that if you pay £66bn now and recoup £67 billion in 10 years, you have lost money because the £67 billion in 10 years time will buy you much less than £66 billion now, and you've paid £10 billion in interest in the meantime.

GeorgeHowell

asturdy2 wrote: »

for them to be profitable they need to find a new way to rip people off i.e ppi insurance, mortgae swap rates ect ...

If that sort of avenue is blocked to them they will just rip of customers with charges for current accounts, higher mortgage rates and overdraft fees, (even) lower savings rates etc. Until and unless there is proper competition in banking they can't lose and we can't win.

grizzly1911

GeorgeHowell wrote: »

If that sort of avenue is blocked to them they will just rip of customers with charges for current accounts, higher mortgage rates and overdraft fees, (even) lower savings rates etc. Until and unless there is proper competition in banking they can't lose and we can't win.

Banks were profitable before they got greedy with all the chasing of market share and cross selling costly poor quality products.

Perhaps if they stuck to core practices and charged the proper costs for lending there is no reason they won't make a consistent, sustainable, reasonable profit rather than obscene profits built on sand. Barclays profits pre tax and extrordanary items have remained fairly robust even allowing for the relatively highcost of sovereign debt bailouts.

Banks have always been poor payers for deposit products or as they would say "competitive rates". They do need to be broken up to bring back proper competition with some "building society, savings bank" type institutions for less complex needs.

If customers won't operate their accounts within agreed facilities, I personally, don't see why they shouldn't be stung.

thor

grizzly1911 wrote: »

Banks have always been poor payers for deposit products or as they would say "competitive rates". They do need to be broken up to bring back proper competition with some "building society, savings bank" type institutions for less complex needs.

It's a pity that the current bunch of Building Societies are too busy rewarding themselves rather than their customers or they could have fulfilled this role.