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”

See Three mistakes will keep U.K. weak for 10 years

Short URL: http://www.ianfraser.org/?p=815

Posted by Ian Fraser on Apr 24 2009. Filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry