Friday, November 28, 2008

Government nationalizes the Royal Bank of Scotland

We all knew it was coming.

The Royal Bank of Scotland has been nationalized. Investors took up just 0.24 percent of today's rights issue, leaving the UK government owning almost 60 percent of the beleaguered bank.

State ownership has started badly. The rights issue was offered at 65.5 per share. Today, the share price stood at 52.7p, which immediately racked up a huge multi-billion paper loss for the Treasury.

The reluctance of investors to buy into RBS is perfectly understandable. With Brown and Darling threatening to force banks to lend, and total confusion about dividends policy, no sensible investor would touch this bank with a barge pole.

4 comments:

  1. I heard somewhere that the paper loss is about 4 billion quid.

    ReplyDelete
  2. How much of Darling's PBR efficiency savings just got extinguished with that loss?

    ReplyDelete
  3. who on earth took up that 0.24%
    im not going to think about my rbs shares for at least 10 years. maybe by then i'll have clawed my way back into the black.

    ReplyDelete
  4. There is always an element of share register that are stupid enough to write cheques out to subscribe even when clearly it would be cheaper to just buy on market.

    Price targets on the group are in the range of 15 - 30 pence, so it looks like it will be a VERY long time before the UK tax payer will get a return. Still, the alternative would have been a fixed price placement and we'd probably be in the same situation anyway!

    ReplyDelete