Get a little Xtra help...

... from the UK taxpayer.

So £37bn in total is to be invested in three of the UK's largest banks. The Royal Bank of Scotland is receiving £5bn from the Government in exchange for preference shares, and the Government is underwriting a rights issue for new ordinary share capital totalling £15bn. So £20bn in all for RBS.

Next up comes HBOS - £8.5bn of ordinary share capital and £3.5bn prefs.

Last in line - Lloyds TSB - raising £5bn.

Barclays has decided to go it alone raising money directly from the market, side-stepping the Government option. It will be interesting to see how this pans out for Barclays. Both HSBC and Barclays are thus emerging from the storm with their businesses still intact. Will they be at a competitive advantage over the other banks in the UK who will be restrained by the need to have to repay the UK taxpayer?


George Osbourne has signalled a change in the Conservative's strategy in how to position themselves over the banking crisis by saying, "To regard today as a triumph, as some in Government seem to do, is bizarre," Mr Osborne said, adding: "It misjudges the public mood. For this is no triumph"

Osbourne followed this up with an attack in the London Evening Standard suggesting that the bank bail-out was a consequence of the 10 year boom fuelled all on debt.

David Cameron, during the Tory party conference, stressed that the Conservatives were willing to work with the Government and would be 'non-partisan'. In times of national crisis, the adversarial business of Parliament is often suspended. However, while the public expect all politicians to work together to get the economy through this crisis, I also think that they expect the Opposition to carefully scrutinise the spending of so much taxpayers' money.

Politically too, the Conservatives realised that they were aligning themselves too closely to the Government. It is crucial for the Tories that Brown comes out of the end of it with the blame for the crisis. Brown is persistent in blaming both the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US and the 'Age of Irresponsibility' in the banking sector. Once the immediate storm has passed, you can expect the Tories to keep reminding voters that it was Brown as Chancellor, who presided over this crisis, as Labour did (and still do) over the Tories' ERM crisis.