Lloyds and RBS to stay in state hands until 2020?
April 24th, 2009
The Bloomberg News columnist Matthew Lynn believes that the UK’s nationalised and part-nationalised banks – which include the Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Banking Group (including HBOS), Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley – will remain in state-ownership for at least a decade.
He said: “No government will dare privatise those banks until they have pulled through at least two economic cycles. A prime minister could never survive selling off a bank that later goes bust. So they will remain state-owned for at least a decade, by which time they may well be so inefficient that no private investors would want to touch them.”
Lynn, a former business and financial journalist on The Sunday Times, added: “Britain increasingly looks like a new version of France: a country trapped in a system of low growth, no incentives for employment, and too weak to provide the fertile ground that entrepreneurs need to build new industries.
“It may well be a generation before the U.K. economy starts to grow again in the way it did in the last two decades”