The British government is considering breaking up Royal Bank of Scotland Group, the country's Treasury chief said Wednesday, a potentially radical move that underscores policy makers' mounting frustration with their inability to arrest a five-year banking crisis. George Osborne, the U.K.'s Chancellor of the Exchequer, said the Treasury "will urgently investigate" the case for splitting RBS—which is 81%-owned by the government following a 2008 bailout—into two separate banks: one housing the lender's healthy assets and the other containing its hefty pile of troubled loans and securities. "We will see whether it's right for Britain to, in effect, see RBS broken up," Mr. Osborne said in his annual speech to London's financial community, a black-tie affair that has become a regular venue for unveiling major news about government banking policy. [WSJ]
Layoffs Watch '12: RBS
Like Bank of America, RBS has some big goals for the coming year, chief among them being the firing of several thousand investment bankers. (For those skeptical they can do it, according to a PowerPoint presentation presented yesterday, re: the "exits," quite a bit of progress has already been made.) Royal Bank of Scotland, Britain’s biggest government-owned lender, said it will cut 300 more jobs at its investment banking unit and is “on track” with its plan to exit businesses. RBS will eliminate 3,800 jobs at the division by the fourth quarter of next year, compared with an earlier target of 3,500, according to slides based on a presentation delivered by John Hourican, chief of markets and international banking, to analysts Monday. About 3,000 of the cuts will have completed this year, RBS said...The bank’s control of costs is “ongoing,” said Chris Kyle, chief financial officer of markets and international banking, at the presentation. “We will almost certainly hit this year’s number” in terms of the guidance, he said. Royal Bank Of Scotland Cuts 300 More Jobs At Investment Bank [Bloomberg] RBS Markets Investor Roundtable [RBS]