The Royal Bank of Scotland has said that it expects to report a loss for the financial year 2008 as it confirmed that there would be a further devaluation of it’s assets, affected by the current financial turmoil.
Write-downs and bad debt charges would wipe out more than £200 million in the third quarter alone. This is on top of nearly £6 billion wiped out from the first half of the year.
The head of M&S, Sir Stuart Rose, was critical of what the banks had previously considered assets. He told the BBC, this morning, that the Hittites had tried to turn lead into gold, just as our banks had tried to do, but now we’ve all come to see that it’s just lead, after all.