Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Report: British banks are insolvent-theoretically

Britains biggest banks are "technically insolvent", Royal Bank of Scotland said yesterday, as the global banking industry was rocked by another day of turmoil, including the announcement of $23bn (£16bn) of new losses from Merrill Lynch and Citigroup, the giant US institutions.

Analysts working for RBS, one of several British banks to have received emergency funding from the UK Government last year, told the City that "the domestic UK banks are technically insolvent on a fully marked-to-market basis".

The warning does not mean British banks are about to go bust, because the assessment is
purely theoretical, and RBS said the position was "not unusual at this stage in the economic cycle".
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/british-banks-are-technically-insolvent-1418229.html

So are all our banks, including JP Morgan, with it's "fortress" balance sheet of fiction.

No comments: