RBS death spiral - down nearly 90% in 12 months According to Mr Peston, we taxpayers will be handing over our £40bn to the banks tomorrow. In exchange we'll be getting their bombed-out equity (all-important details still TBC). £15bn (or more) will go into RBS equity, which Peston describes as an humiliation for the once proud Royal Bank. But we taxpayers see it more as a stick-up....

OT, but how about a running total of the value of "equity" raised in debt-for-equity swaps now that plenty of companies are getting in on the game. Would be useful to know how much taxpayers money ISN'T being wasted on Gordon buying equity.

Let's hope Darling's read the book If today's reports are to be believed, the government is all set to inject £50bn of taxpayers' money into bank equity. It's being trailed as taking a leaf out of Warren Buffett's book, the legendary superstar of investment who "saved" Goldman Sachs by putting $5bn into their equity last month. As we've said before, nobody ...

John McFall thinks so. Whereas the rest of us know so. We know that we are subsidising several banks. Well, no subsidy without equity, and no equity without control of policy.

This is interesting: Defined benefit (DB) pension liabilities of some of the world largest banks are now significantly greater than the bank’s equity market value, according to Pension Capital Strategies (PCS). The advisory firm’s latest report on the FTSE100 pension schemes revealed equity investments held by the pension schemes of HBOS, Lloyds TSB and RBS may outstrip the bank’...

The Bank of England said last week that "around 7%-11% of UK owner-occupiers with mortgages were in negative equity in the spring of 2009." There are 11.7 oustanding mortgages in the UK, so that would give us between 800,000 and 1,300,000 in negative equity. Lloyds/HBOS said back in February that about 16% of its borrowers were in negative equity. Lloyds/HBOS has 28% of the market, so whether you ...

This taken from a BBC message board (amazingly, not yet taken down by the BBC PC PCs).. One thing needs to change... The Royal Bank of Scotland is no longer Scottish - with 80% of "UK" taxpayers being English - the English taxpayer is now the majority shareholder. Time to change it's name to something more representative: "The mainly English Bank" or "The English Taxpayers Bank" by EnglandRis...

Let's hope Darling's read the book If today's reports are to be believed, the government is all set to inject £50bn of taxpayers' money into bank equity. It's being trailed as taking a leaf out of Warren Buffett's book, the...

If you take the distribution of loan-to-value figures from Chart 1.9 to The Bank of England's latest Financial Stability Report, then subject to a few assumptions*, the cumulative total number of households in neqative equity for each 5% fall in house prices is as follows:* The assumptions are: there are 11.8 million outstanding mortgages; mortgagors have no other financial assets or liabilities; ...

People who have bought expensive houses on a mortgage, at rising interest rates, will be relieved to experience falling interest rates at last. But at the same time house prices are falling faster than the fall in interest rates, eroding their equity stake - if they had positive equity in the first place. At some point their equity becomes zero turning them purely into tenants of their own propert...