Bailed-out British banks

Interesting news out of Mother England: Her Majesty’s Government, which bailed out several very large & very failing banks in the past year, are now instructing those institutions to start breaking up & selling their component parts in the interests of smaller companies & greater competition.

You may recall that the spectacular failures of the Royal Bank of Scotland & HBOS prompted something unheard-of in the corporate world: apologies from their CEOs in Parliament. With a suitable complement of crocodile tears (& no relinquishing of compensation).

So it’s interesting that HMG are playing hardball with the banks—seeing as to how they (on behalf of the British taxpayer) hold major stakes in the companies—wielding their shareholder power to give them what-for.

The deal apparently is: you want state aid? Start trimming the organization.&—get this—beginning with bonuses: no one at RBS or Lloyds earning more than £39K ($65K) in 2009 will be getting a bonus.

& no swapping assets among the Old Boys’ Network: only companies new to the financial industry will be allowed to buy. One of the interested parties is that wild man, Richard Branson. I’d like to see what he does with a bank, because I purely admire how he runs an airline. (If he buys NatWest I’ll have skin in the game, as I still have an account there.)

It’ll be interesting to see if our own Administration & Congress conjure up the cojones to start handing out machetes to Bank of America, Citigroup & Wells Fargo. That would help end the “too big to fail” argument for throwing billions of our money at these fools.