I am a bit depressed by the Manchester City result.

Can you really buy success on the football field? Manchester City walloped Pompey six-nil and there was the whole spectacle of Calamity James coming out and missing the ball and the ridiculous little dances by City players as the goals went in. They should have been booked by the referee and they might have been if the referee was the venerable Mike Riley. He did not do much for the Chelsea-Manchester Utd clash although the Blues had enough chances to win it.
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I read the Sunday papers and was flabbergasted to find out that Lloyds TSB has wanted to buy out fellow banking group HBOS for several years. The only figure being put out by Lloyds TSB is £1bn. This is the figure for cost savings but the banking group has not been prepared to announce how many job losses there will be.

Halifax goes down with all hands!!

The considered, precise view on the Halifax (HBOS) rescue by Lloyds TSB can be found on a good story carried by FT.Com http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d7fa43e0-8496-11dd-b148-0000779fd18c.html?nclick_check=1. This blog will muse on what was the glory of an UK mortgage bank with a balance sheet of £600bn.

For instance, the share price performance of Halifax was pretty dire and signalled major operational shortcomings. It must have been dire to consider a merger, sorry a takeover by Lloyds TBS, a bank, which has grown by mincing companies. Halifax board members and executives will know that they will not have much of a future in the combined group unless a leopard has changed its spots.
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Founded in 1853 at the Old Cock Inn in the Yorkshire town of Halifax, the institution grew from a building society to a major financial group cemented with the acquisition of Bank of Scotland to form HBOS. I did have the shares from the demutualisation of the building society but had to sell at around £4 due to household necessities. I also had a current account, which paid excellent interest but I was getting disturbed by sales calls from Halifax staff trying to sell insurance etc.

For many years Halifax was in competition with Abbey National, which is now owned by
Banco Santander of Spain. Ironically, Lloyds TSB tried to acquire Abbey National in 2002 and now must be having a wry chuckle with the start of the process to buy the Halifax, which has a market leading 20 per cent of UK housing loans.

Apparently, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been involved in the negotiations since the deal will get a waiver from competition problems. However, I don't know what the European Union will think of that. Yet, speed is required for the transaction to go ahead and I don't think the British government would be interested in nationalising Halifax following its rescue of Northern Rock.

Daily Telegraph investigates Northern Rock.

The City staff of Daily Telegraph has carried out an investigation into the September collapse of Northern Rock. On September 9th Chancellor Alistair Darling
felt unable to overrule Bank of England governor Mervyn King, who was refusing to
accept the request of £30bn from Lloyds TSB. This was for central bank funding to
to support Lloyds TSB's rescue bid for Northern Rock. The Newcastle-based bank
now has received taxpayer funds £24bn. There have been calls that to protect
these taxpayer funds Northern Rock should be nationalised.

Northern Rock?

It is a crying shame that Northern Rock has run into difficulties given its
commitment to the North-East with its foundation. I bought a few shares as a
high-risk punt and it was very high risk. I suppose I should just have to
sit and wait.
It is a very sad sight if you see queues of people scrambling for their
deposits. I remember a small building society called Southdown in East Sussex,
which was subject to a few rumours in August 1991 and that was that. There was
a scramble by depositors to get their money out and Southdown had to be rescued by
another building society. I would urge Northern Rock customers to be calm
and hopefully the weekend will give the bank much needed time.
Lloyds TSB has been viewed as a possible bidder but any predator might prefer
to buy the assets in a future distress sale. It depends on what the Bank of England
comes up with. What is clear is that the board and top management of Northern Rock
are looking at alternative career options.