You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future.
-- Thomas Sankara, 1985
The Sunday Times reports that the Royal Bank of Scotland is about to announce a £1 billion loss at least for the first half of the year, with anal-ists warning that it could slide to £1.7 billion. That, they say, is the largest loss in UK banking history.
So I’m adding RBS to the UK watch list:
Barclays
Bradford & Bingley
HBOS
RBS
August is going to be an interesting month.