Cost Of Bank Bail-Outs

A very rocky road, and still a mountain to climb

This morning's National Audit Office report on the cost of bank bail-outs is being headlined as saying taxpayers will likely escape without loss. But it actually says nothing of the kind.

True, the NAO tells us taxpayer exposure to the special guarantee and indeminity schemes (the Asset Protection Scheme, the Special Liquidity Scheme, and the Credit Guarantee Scheme) has halved to around £500bn. But:

"The Treasury retains the unquantifiable ultimate risk of supporting banks should they threaten the stability of the overall financial system. The outstanding £512 billion is only on the explicit support already provided. Further intensification of financial instability may require additional intervention."

That massive implicit guarantee is one we've blogged many times. And let's be under no illusions - at a time when there are still huge uncertainties surrounding the creditworthimess of banks right across Europe, the market reckons our two big nationalised banks remain pretty risky.

As the NAO highlights, the market price for insuring against default by RBS or Lloyds has remained right at the top of the range for similarly sized European banks (NB a 5 year Credit Default Swap cost of 200 basis points pa roughly means the market reckons there's at least a 2% chance of default within 1 year, implying at least a 1-in-10 chance of default within 5 years).

And with that level of risk, unsurprisingly our banks have underperformed other banks in the equity market:

In other words, we're still propping up two relatively high risk megabanks that the market doesn't much like the look of.

And there's another point the NAO highlights. In order to inject funds into the banks, the government has had to borrow more. And that costs. According to the NAO:

"...the Government is paying some £5 billion a year (£10 billion so far) in interest on the Government borrowing raised to finance the purchase of shares and loans to banks. This ongoing cost is material in terms of the overall public finances and deficit. This £5 billion a year was not included in the Treasury’s previous estimates of the loss to the taxpayer, because the Treasury does not consider them to be direct costs. The estimated £5 billion a year interest on this debt is 11 per cent of the total £44 billion forecast to be paid in interest on public sector debt in 2010-11."

Whatever it says in the headline, the bottom line is that we ain't out of jail yet. Not by a long chalk.

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