For a change some bad news about banks
We are getting used to eye-wateringly large corporate losses in the Great Banking Recession of 2008-9 but this morning Royal Bank of Scotland takes the biscuit: a, the biggest sea of red ink in British corporate history. 
By cruel irony, it also became public this morning that Fred Goodwin, former boss of RBS and the man who presided over these record losses, is sitting at home enjoying a pension pot so large it will pay him an annual income of £650,000 for the rest of his life. He's only 50. You wonder what he'd have been entitled to had his bank actually made a profit. No wonder Chancellor Darling was fuming this morning -- in so far as this mild-mannered man can fume -- about the need for some of this pension pot to be handed back. Don't hold your breath.
As RBS's losses are announced the government is putting the finishing touches to stage three of its bank bail out: £600 billion in taxpayers' guarantees to RBS and HBOS, the two British banks most in trouble, to insure the toxic assets held by both banks. In return both banks, which have already been bailed out by the taxpayer taking a £37 billion combined stake in them and various other state guarantees to prop them up, will promise to provide extra loans to homebuyers and business worth about £40 billion.
We'll be looking at this third bank bail out and wonder if it will work -- or if the government should have gone for temporary but total nationalisation of both banks, as the Swedes did in similar circumstances in the early 1990s.
Also today, Peter Mandelson gives details of his , most likely to a Dutch or German operator. Labour MPs have promised one of the biggest rebellions in 12 years of Labour government so the Business Secretary is announcing a series of concessions today to try and stave that off. We'll be talking to Billy Hayes from the Communications Union; he's unlikely to be satisfied.
Is the benefit culture to blame for the rate of teenage pregnancies? Our guest of the day, Peter Stringfellow thinks so. Figures out today show an increase despite a ten year campaign to cut it by half.
And we'll be looking at political assassinations with the political historian Anthony Howard.
All that on the Daily Politics live at Noon on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳2 and afterwards on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ iPlayer.
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