Rescue: Lloyds pulls HBOS out of the fire with £12bn merger

Source: The Guardian

A £12bn takeover of Britain's biggest lender, HBOS, failed to halt the deepening crisis in world financial markets last night, as a wave of fresh speculation on global stock markets saw two of Wall Street's most prestigious investment banks targeted as the latest victims of the credit crunch.

Gordon Brown intervened to broker a solution to HBOS, and Downing Street made clear it was prepared to rip up competition laws to allow the takeover - a move which may cause the loss of tens of thousands of jobs and the closure of up to 500 branches. After intense negotiations, a deal was clinched shortly after 9.30pm, and is to be announced this morning. The two companies agreed that Lloyds TSB would pay 232p per HBOS share.



Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/sep/18/marketturmoil.hbosbusiness

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Free enterprise. Companies love it.
Dumbing down loves it.
Everyone loves the obvious simple solution. Except that they are wrong.

...but the British billion is written with 12 zeros so a £12bn bailout would appear as £12,000,000,000,000.00.

Actually, the British way of expressing the bailout amount would be £12 thousand millions. It is still a shit-load of money no matter how it is expressed!

the news from Britain keeps getting from bad to worse constantly.

Now the rate is 1.79 and is still falling.

and in financial writing, the American '9 zeros' has been the normal use in the UK for a couple of decades, at least.

...for gold. It creates confusion for the unaware and where there is confusion there is always the opportunity for deception

exactly how much shit on paper was being held in the way of worthless US bonds related to the US housing scam.

Over the past six years the £ had risen from £1.00 : US$1.42 to £1.00 : US$2.00 . Now it's floating around US$1.79

The ECB is not prepared to do the kind of bailouts done in the US.

This could get very scary...

He was talking more about Sheffield Wednesday's midweek thrashing at the hands of Reading but he seemed quite happy with the merger as it means that the government won't have to nationalize as they did with Northern Rock.