Der Verlust der britischen Steuerzahler von 10,2 Mrd. GBP bei Rettung von RBS

We could’ve given away the Chagos islands for feee!

Honestly that is significantly better than the alternative would have been.

You’d have been looking at tens of billions wiped out of the UK economy, people losing their homes as interest rates skyrocketed well beyond what they did, new mortgages becoming impossible.

A complete collapse of business loans, peoples savings would vanish, current accounts gone – a massive rush on banks from people desperate to withdraw their cash – which would have caused a run of bankruptcies that would have crippled London especially.

Gordon Brown literally did the best thing he could possibly have done and the UK probably suffered the least of most European countries. Which is remarkable given that we’ve built a huge chunk of our national GDP on the banking and financial sector, and we didn’t suffer a complete collapse of the banking sector (largely thanks to Americas piss poor regulation) in the biggest **global** financial collapse of all time (arguably at least, the 1930 great depression in the US may have been bigger).

„Should have let them go bankrupt“ is something I heard a lot at the time – something said by people who are completely ignorant, and have no understanding of what would have happened if that was allowed, yes they were literally too big to fail.

Should we have allowed them to get too big, to have that much power in our economy in the first place? Probably not, but we did. Blame Thatcher and Reagan (among others) for allowing that to occur, it was much too late by 2008 (and not much has changed today in reality we’re stuck in the same system, maybe with mildly better regulation in Europe at least).

We should have a national bank that offers reasonable mortgages, business loans for UK firms, savings, has a branch in all decent sized towns and access for others via the post office. Let it make a reasonable profit that goes back to the coffers.

Let privatised banks compete with it.

Natwest was an opportunity to do that. Wasted.

Imagine being the only source of funding in a giant banking crisis where the banks are on their knees literally begging for money with no other choice.

Only the UK government could be so incompetent and stupid as to lose money on such a deal.

Bailouts should be on extremely harsh terms to motivate other businesses not to need them.

Also Glass Stegal is the only long term solution to banking instability.

This is simplistic garbage. What would the cost have been with NO intervention.

The true value of trains goes beyond the surface level ticket sales – it doesn’t take account of wider economic benefits of the railway, the mileage saved from less car journeys, all of which go unseen – but if you listened to the lazy media, you’d think that trains are just a black hole of cash.

Apply that to the banks and economy – if left to implode, the cost would have been in the hundreds of billions and a hell of a human cost.

Yet sky news spins it as a 10.2 billion “loss”.