RBS: don't privatise! Expropriate!
"The whole idea of a bank that is 82% owned by the taxpayer but run at arm's length from government is a nonsense...", says Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England. King's answer is that the 82%-owned Royal Bank of Scotland should be broken up. The profit-making bits of it would be privatised, and the loss-making bits retained by the government and run down. The Government is reluctant because doing that would mean open and definitively registering the losses the Government has made on the RBS shares it bought in the crisis of 2008. The operation was always more like "compensation without...