Breaking….rbs Fails Carney Stress Test: Disgrace, Danger & Deficiency Stalks Britain

Eight years of muddle, fraud and waste…. ….and Freddie Goodwin’s shredded bank is the same basket case it was in 2008. This – disabled people, Waspi victims, zero-hours victims, Junior doctors, miners and steel workers – is why “THERE’S NO MONEY LEFT”

Some previous Slog headers since 2012:

……and not forgetting……

I only want to make a few succinct points here:

1. We own this bank. We’ve owned it for eight years
2. During that time, it has been serially problematic
3. It has cheated thousands of SME businesses
4. It has hidden problems behind glitches
5. It has awarded massive bonuses to its staff
6. It has been a money pit the entire time
7. Where was investigative journalism during this period?
8. Where was the Labour Party?
9. Where were the regulators?

Everyone from Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling to Vince Cable and George Osborne has been complicit in covering up its frauds and debts, denying the former and shifting the latter here, there and everywhere.

Mark Carney’s new stress test shows RBS missed targets for common equity Tier 1 capital, a key measure of financial strength, and a leverage measure before the conversion of some debt to equity was factored in. Further, a different stress scenario revealed that the 73% taxpayer-owned lender hasn’t made much progress since it scraped through the BOE’s 2015 check-up: it has yet to settle U.S. probes into the sale of mortgage-backed securities that could cost the bank billions, and is still trying to sell its Williams & Glyn unit.

Philip Hammond knew all of this before he made his Autumn statement last week. He said nothing about a potential failure that could increase the National Debt by 30%.

This is a failure of Governance. It is the personification of just how unutterably mendacious, crooked and incompetent the British Establishment is.

Perhaps the Government will engineer a bailin. Good luck with that one, Mr Hammond.