The clean-up bill for Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group has already topped £90bn, put nearly 80,000 jobs on the line, and left taxpayers nursing a £32bn loss on their stakes in the bailed-out banks. But when they report their results for 2011 this week, both are likely to concede that their salvage operations are not yet complete, despite three years of downsizing and reshaping. Sir Philip Hampton, chairman of RBS, admitted recently that when he took on the job he had expected 2012 to be the year that the government could herald a sell-off of the bank's shares. Yet, with the economy, the ongoing crisis in the eurozone and a series of regulatory changes – including the ring-fencing proposals from the Vickers commission on banking – all combining to weigh down on bank share prices, analysts reckon that the government will be stuck with an 82% stake in RBS and a 41% stake in Lloyds for some time yet. Robert Talbut, chief investment officer of Royal London Asset Management, says: "It is very clear to everyone that the government are going to hold these stakes for much longer than anybody anticipated. The prospect of the government being able to sell down their stakes in the next three years is extremely slim. That is due to regulatory change both in the UK and globally. It is also due to the interrelation between the growth rates in the UK economy and what that means for asset values on a lot of the assets that they have on their balance sheets."
0 comments:
Post a Comment