RBS repays £163bn emergency loans The government still has an 82% stake in RBS Royal Bank of Scotland is to say that as of next week, it will have repaid all the £163bn of emergency loans it received from UK and US taxpayers, BBC business editor Robert Peston says. The announcement is expected when the bank reports its first-quarter results on Friday. The government still owns 82% of shares in the bank. Lloyds has also said it will have repaid all its emergency borrowing from UK taxpayers by the end of the year. Lloyds' borrowing peaked at £157bn. Both banks took out the emergency loans at the height of the financial crisis. In total, RBS received: £75bn from the credit guarantee scheme - bonds issued by banks that are guaranteed against default by the Treasury - and the Bank of England's special liquidity scheme £36.6bn in emergency liquidity assistance from the Bank of England $84.5bn (£52.4bn in today's money) from the US Federal Reserve So its peak disclosed borrowing from government-backed schemes was £163.84bn - all of which will be repaid as of next week. It also paid the UK Treasury between £1bn and £1.5bn in fees for the credit gurantee scheme, making the taxpayer a profit on that particular intervention. RBS is still receiving some central bank support via the 10bn euros of cheap three-year loans from the European Central Bank's long-term refinancing operation (LTRO). But our correspondent says the bank insists that the LTRO is an opportunistic way for it to get cheap funding, rather than emergency assistance. So if all this money has been repaid to the government why do we still have such a large deficit? Surely that money should go straight on that? Am I missing something?
Dont worry Tony, all will be revealed when ,some bent government minister flogs the whole lot off to Virgin, at a loss to the taxpayer.
There is no surplus because it's all going to Greece and Portugal, and to repay any loans the government has elsewhere. The whole world is ****ed. Governments have been living on credit for so long, that one mistake an it's tits up. Recession will be along again soon... Uk is already back in one, as is Spain. Germany can only hold up Europe for so long...
