{"id":6210,"date":"2010-02-25T12:14:07","date_gmt":"2010-02-25T10:14:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2010\/02\/25\/rbs-time-to-ask-the-big-questions\/"},"modified":"2010-02-25T12:14:07","modified_gmt":"2010-02-25T10:14:07","slug":"rbs-time-to-ask-the-big-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2010\/02\/25\/rbs-time-to-ask-the-big-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"RBS – time to ask the big questions"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve blogged about RBS and its problems form the time before it was almost nationalised. The issue does not go away. As the Guardian notes:<\/p>\n

\n

Royal Bank of Scotland faced renewed criticism over its decision to hand out \u00a31.3bn of bonuses to its investment bankers<\/a> this morning as the state-controlled bank reported a loss of \u00a33.6bn.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I’m not going to go on about bonuses. I’ve suggested taxes to tackle them in Taxing Banks<\/a>. Financial transaction taxes will also, for reasons I explain in that report, have a significant impact on their behaviour and pay \u2014 although many seem to seek to deny this.<\/p>\n

The real questions regarding RBS are not about bonuses. They’re about:<\/p>\n

1) Why this bank was not wholly nationalised<\/p>\n

2) Why RBS and Northern Rock were not merged to create a bank ensuring access to financial services for all<\/p>\n

3) Why RBS did not become the core of a new National Investment Bank for SMEs<\/p>\n

4) Why Northern Rock did not become the core of a new bank financing affordable housing <\/p>\n

5) Why RBS could not have been used as the financier at the core of the Green New Deal.<\/p>\n

These things could have happened, and should happen still. Instead a desire to maintain the status quo, to keep Northern Rock as an outlying player in the mortgage market, to keep RBS as a major operator in all the most abusive forms of socially useless financial trading, and to keep both in line with the demands of a market that has obviously failed is left as the driving motive for their management. <\/p>\n

This is what is wrong with RBS. Nothing will change until we change the way we approach banking. That has not happened yet. As a result the next disaster is waiting to happen. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve blogged about RBS and its problems form the time before it was almost nationalised. The issue does not go away. As the Guardian notes:
 Read the full article…<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[70,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-banking","category-economics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6210"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6210\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}