Skip to main content

Northern Rock

Northern Rock (or at least part of it) was sold yesterday to Virgin Money.  At the time of its nationalisation, we were told that this could be a "good" investment for the British taxpayer.  It hasn't been, and it never was going to be.  Ed Balls believes that the Tory government got a poor price for it - click here.  The irony, of course, is that Balls was at the heart of the New Labour government which allowed and encouraged  banks to take imprudent risks in the first place.  What a nerve!


The taxpayer loss on the Northern Rock (estimated at circa £400m) is small change compared to the eventual loss to taxpayers associated with the bailouts of RBS and Lloyds-TSB.  In 2009, RBS posted a loss of £24.1 billion (£24,100,000,000) and Lloyd's TSB a loss of £10.8 billion.  The RBS loss in 2009 holds the world record for the single largest corporate loss posted by a failed bank.

Hyun Song Shin at Princeton has an interesting paper on the Northern Rock collapse - click here.

Popular posts from this blog

Bitcoin Bubble?

According to Robert Shiller , speaking at Davos, Bitcoin is a perfect example of a bubble - story here . Shiller sees Bitcoin as a backwards step in the evolution of money.   George Selgin , a free banker, takes an opposing view - click here .  Although he doesn't believe that Bitcoin is money, he sees its development as a fascinating turn in the evolution of money. In particular, he lauds the fact that Bitcoin production is constrained and cannot be infinite. There is a short video below where Bitcoin explain how it works.
Read more

How Valuable Are Connections?

Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, Amir Kermani, James Kwak and Todd Mitton have written a paper on whether firms connected to Timothy Geithner benefited from these connections. They do so by looking at how stocks of these firms reacted to the announcement that he was a nominee for Treasury Secretary in November 2008. They find that there were large abnormal returns for connected firms. Below is the paper's abstract and the full paper is available here . The announcement of Timothy Geithner as nominee for Treasury Secretary in November 2008 produced a cumulative abnormal return for financial firms with which he had a connection. This return was about 6% after the first full day of trading and about 12% after ten trading days. There were subsequently abnormal negative returns for connected firms when news broke that Geithner's confirmation might be derailed by tax issues. Excess returns for connected firms may reflect the perceived impact of relying on the advice of a small ne
Read more

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles, co-authored with my colleague Will Quinn , is forthcoming in August. It is published by Cambridge University Press and is available for pre-order at Amazon , Barnes and Noble , Waterstones and Cambridge University Press . 
Read more