Geld genoeg, maar niemand wil het hebben...
Vandaag in The Guardian:
RBS 'desperate' to lend £20bn - but no-one wants it
Stephen Hester, chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, has said there are no takers for £20bn of funds the bank would like to lend out.
The boss of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is expected to provide details this week of how he will persuade reluctant businesses to borrow a £20bn cash pile it is “desperate” to lend.
Stephen Hester, chief executive of the 82pc-taxpayer-owned bank, waded into the controversy about an apparent lack of lending to businesses, arguing that companies were not prepared to borrow because they lacked faith in the economic recovery.
“We are lending as much as we can. We are not constrained by either capital or funding,” Mr Hester said in an interview over the weekend. “The only way I could see for us to lend more would be for someone to say we did not have to operate by any commercial standard — that we could undercut everyone because we did not have to make a profit.”
In an apparent shot across the bow of Sir Mervyn King, the Bank of England governor, Mr Hester also said that RBS had “deposits coming out our ears”. Sir Mervyn has called for RBS to raise more capital or be broken up. In March, he said the Government should seize control of the bank before it is restructured into a “good bank” and a “bad bank”.
High-street lenders have been accused of stifling the recovery in Britain by failing to lend to smaller companies. However, Mr Hester’s statement implies that it is lack of progress in improving business confidence that is stopping companies from investing for growth, rather than banks constraining lending criteria.