Defaulting banks - where will it stop?

[David Guyatt]

ATMs not giving people their own cash?

I wonder what would have happened. :dancing2:

UK was hours from bank shutdown
FSA ready to close cash machines during crisis


Britain was within hours of a banking shutdown last autumn as the government battled to piece together a rescue plan for the stricken Halifax and Royal Bank of Scotland, it has emerged.


Treasury mandarins and Bank of England officials battled the clock to come up with a support package on the weekend of 12 October. If they had failed, the Financial Services Authority could have ordered the closure of cash machines and prevented deposits at either of the two main casualties of the global financial chaos.


Hector Sants, chief executive of the FSA, said: "The FSA knew we could not have allowed them [RBS and HBOS] to open their doors on the Monday morning without a solution."


In the absence of a deal, the FSA would have issued notices to the two banks forbidding them from taking deposits or allowing withdrawals. Such a drastic move, a year after the hugely damaging run on Northern Rock, was unthinkable and the authorities had to come up with a fully worked-out rescue.


"HBOS and RBS would not have survived without government intervention," said Sants, who was involved in the frantic negotiations that weekend to ensure the banking system did not collapse.


Our investigation into the weekend that saved the UK banking system from collapse revealed that RBS had been on "life support" from the Bank of England since the previous Tuesday. According to government sources, Threadneedle Street took aggressive action to ensure RBS had the billions it needed to keep operating on a day-by-day basis after other banks refused to lend the Edinburgh-based bank money. RBS was depositing assets at the Bank of England in return for crucial funding.


RBS was once regarded as so safe that rivals used to deposit huge sums with it overnight. Once Lehman collapsed, rivals were so concerned it been overstretched by the acquisition of ABN Amro the previous autumn that it too could have faced collapse, say government sources.


The authorities saw the Bank of England's intervention as a stopgap measure, with the taxpayer bailout for the two banks orchestrated on the weekend of 11/12 October seen as the only way regulators could have let them continue trading on the morning of 13 October given the state of their finances.


An unprecedented £20bn was pumped into RBS, and its chief executive, Sir Fred Goodwin, was ousted, while £17bn was poured into HBOS and Lloyds TSB, which had agreed to rescue the ailing mortgage lender the previous month.


But the authorities had been preparing for problems at HBOS and held discussions with the obvious suitors - HBSC, Santander (owner of Abbey) and Lloyds, which was interested in a deal with its troubled rival. The rescue of HBOS, barely 48 hours after Lehman collapsed on 15 September, meant that only one of the "mortgage banks", created from demutualised building societies a decade earlier, remained. Bradford & Bingley needed to be partly nationalised two weeks later. All the other mortgage banks - Northern Rock, Abbey National, Woolwich and Alliance & Leicester - had been consumed by rivals or failed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/...ial-crisis

Had the ATMs closed down riots would've followed Brit style, by the liberal chucking of handfuls of custard creams at bank executives amidst booing and slow hand-clapping. Having exorcised their demons it would've been home for a cuppa and months of moaning and bitching.

Of course, the real problem we face today is that we cannot stuff our money under the mattress to protect it from avaricious bankers. It therefore, behoves us to diversify our assets among several unrelated banks so that the failure of one will not too adversely impact on our finances. And the problem with that is that in the UK there are not so many as 8 unconnected banks, and in a few years this number will, I think be done to five or four or even less.

Then we truly will be in fuck street.