THE ROYAL Bank of Scotland is to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the planned $700 billion bail-out that comes courtesy of the American tax-payer if the US Congress gives the financial rescue package the go-ahead this weekend.
The bank's share of the bail-out will enable RBS to offload billions of dollars of questionable assets.
The bank's shares closed last Friday at 205p, a 71% fall from their pre-credit-crunch peak. However, analysts and investors predict that the shares will rebound sharply when markets open on Monday morning if the bail-out is approved over the weekend.
The Edinburgh-based bank will be able to write off a significant portion of its dodgy assets thanks to the bail-out, also known as into Tarp, the Troubled Asset Relief Programme as a result of the bank's significant presence in the US. Tarp was the brainchild of US treasury secretary Hank Paulson, who earlier this week got down on his knees and begged Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House speaker, to rescue his plan to save Wall Street.
The Royal Bank, led by chief executive Sir Fred Goodwin, has had operations in the United States since 1988, when it bought the Rhode Island-based Citizens Bank. It has since bulked up its presence there with a string of acquisitions including those of Connecticut based Greenwich NatWest and Ohio-based Charter One. This entitles the Scottish bank to entrust billions of dollars of non-performing loans and sub-prime tainted assets to US taxpayers, according to Colin McLean, chief executive of Edinburgh-based SVM Asset Management.
He could not quantify the exact amount of dodgy assets that RBS can offload but said it could amount to "billions". In total, RBS has outstanding loans of $1.5 trillion. |