General Chat

Banking shares lead the FTSE 100 higher today as banks are among the top gainers. Barclays was the star performer on the index, rising 1.5%, while HSBC added 1.2% and Royal Bank of Scotland made gains of 1%.

Strange how Bankers always seem to come up smelling of roses :-S :-|

strange how spellcheck keeps substituting B for W........innit!

You know what Bankers say to each other - What Crisis ;-)

For goodness sake, whoever reported Bobtanian's post needs to learn to control those twitches in their typing fingers - I would like to why they RR'd it :-|

Even if bank shares are rising they have got a long, long way to go to recoup their fall.

The losers if the price is low are not bankers, but you and I as most of large company shares are held by pension funds and insurance companies so unless you are on a civil service (unfunded) pension you lose out when the price drops.

Personally, as a small shareholder, what was meant to be a safe ISA in Lloyds and Halifax shares has cost me several thousand pounds.

'Austerity has a voracious appetite'.

Women in the Daily Fail last week complaining they are struggling to survive on £150,000 per annum. Life must be really tough for them unlike the rest of us trying to get by on if we're lucky the average wage of 26,000 per annum. Despite a full time wage I earn less than half the average though. :-(

Maybe our RRer is a fellow banker..........

spellcheck disabled!! ;-)

Tawny - and some of us have to get by on just over a third of that :-(

Strange things shares.....

If they go up, you can take profits

If they fall, its a buying opportunity

If a company makes people redundant or issues bad news, they go up, because the company is doing something positive.

Never invest in shares unless you can afford to lose the lot.

Andy

We look upon banks, bank managers & all types of investment advisers with the same mixture of envy, admiration & dislike with which the poor favour the rich in every generation.

The same applies generally to Government Ministers but without the descriptive word 'admiration'. That would be going just a tad too far.

BrianW - I accept that bank shares have got some distance to go to get back to their pre-crisis levels, I just wish they would do what banks used to do, which is to support businesses, especially small businesses, and that they concentrated on that instead of speculating on the international money markets and derivatives.

An aunt of my mum's had a cousin who was married to a chap who was a director of RBS in the 1960's, he would be turning in his grave at what banks have got up to over the past 30 years and what some of them are still getting up to today - there is no doubt in my mind that it was by getting involved with investment banking and the derivatives markets plus the bigger is better goal - that sparked this whole sorry saga off.

Sorry to hear of your experience of what was meant to be a safe ISA.

'Robert Peston tests the arguments made by the authors of a new book who claim the financial crisis was caused by exploding household debt - not by the banks'.

But are they right? Analysis - BBC Radio 4 this evening @ 8:30.

Bobtanian - maybe whoever reported your post has a very down to earth vocabulary and could only think of one word, they did not consider that "W" could also mean, Wasters, Wrongdoers, Wallies, or Wolves ;-)

LOL ;-) :-D