Not taking inflation into account. In the 1970's you could by a house for a few grand.

Of course the trouble with debt is that it keeps growing from the interest. The more interest paid the less of the actual debt can be paid. Britain's debt is growing as is the rest of Europe. Our debt is slightly above the European average.

Spot on. And not just from an economic point of view but a social one, too.

If capitalism is to be fair, and to work properly, then there must be as many ways to fall as there are to rise. No wonder people are railing against capitalism now, when those who caused the crash were bailed out at taxpayers' expense. They should've crashed and burnt.

Yet another example of government intervention backfiring.

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.

Brown fcuked up bigtime over the merger with Lloyds and HBOS and that messy bail out.

My Mrs works for LBG Risk Dept now, but was part of the HBOS clan as they bought out Clerical Medical who she was with at the time.

HBOS Directors (like Andy Hornby) were risk taking morons. They shunned the usual method of personal investors funding borrowers to play the money markets and got their fingers burned. They also lent large sums to dodgy businesses at levels higher than the properties were worth and for unsustainable repayment amounts over ridiculously long terms. ie Toxic lending.
They also conned their staff into turning actual cash bonuses into share promises of 2 for 1 if they left them with HBOS for 5 years. These were worthless after the merger.

Unsurprisingly they went t1ts up when the global banking crisis gathered momentum.

Brown (and Darling to a lesser degree) persuaded Lloyds to take on HBOS thereby ruining 2 banks instead of just one. Since then LBG has struggled to completely rid itself of the whiff of corruption that HBOS was involved in, PPI, Libor etc.

RBS should have been sold off last year, but too much dissent was shown about the share price then... ironically it has worsened even more as it fails to rise from the ashes. Today's news that it failed the BoE stress test again surprises no one!

Edited by Hoof Hearted (30 Nov 2016 11.00am)

Not entirely. Lehman was allowed to go to the wall - a deliberate choice given it was deemed to not be too systematically important.

Comparisons to Iceland are mostly spurious given the size etc but there are some lessons to be drawn from the way they treated the banking sector.

I've read through the stress testing report and the scenario looks like a step change in severity given previous incarnations (and I've worked on stress testing at some banks in previous years). It would be a truly global and severe recession that would create the scenario they have used so some banks failing isn't surprising. But then RBS coming out worst is also not a surprise and their share price reflects that.

Further cost cutting and asset run offs have to be the only viable option for them to build up their £2bn shortfall given the bank continues to be loss making.

In fact I heard from a friend who works there that quite a few were put at risk in the last week, plus most of the old RCR division are going either by the end of the year or end of Q1 next.

"It's almost like a moral decision. Except not really cos noone is going to find out," Jez, Peep Show