Sir Fred Goodwin: Give The Money Up Fred!!

Posted yesterday: More Pension Money For RBS's Sir Fred Goodwin

On the UK Sun ( Yeah, absolutely love this tabloid for its juicer footie stories. :p2 ), they are reporting that Sir Fred Goodwin is fighting for his pension: Axed RBS boss 'guards pension'

My personal feeling Sir Fred Goodwin should take a good look in the mirror and ask himself that isn't the pension money outrageously insane given the size and the magnitude of how badly RBS has screwed up under his leadership? Look at what has happened to RBS. Does he think he should be rewarded for leading RBS to where it is now?

Give the money up Fred!

Look at what the UK Government is doing just to clean up your mess. Whose money is it?

And here you are insisting that you will not voluntarily give your money up.

Don't you have any dignity left in yourself?

Come on, do the only thing that is correct.

Give the money up!!!!!

Axed RBS boss 'guards pension'

• FORMER Royal Bank of Scotland boss Sir Fred Goodwin has written to the Treasury indicating he will not voluntarily give up his pension, it was revealed tonight.
  
  Sir Fred is coming under increasing pressure to give up at least part of the pension, worth an estimated £693,000 a year.
  
  He is already receiving it at the age of 50 under an early retirement deal agreed with the RBS board when he was forced out last October.
  
  Royal Bank of Scotland's record losses in 2008 are the BIGGEST in British corporate history.
  
  Prime Minister Gordon Brown today said the Government was looking at legal action to claw back the money, insisting that there should be “no reward for failure”.
  
  But Treasury sources this evening revealed that Sir Fred has written to City minister Lord Myners to say that he is not ready to waive his entitlement.
  
  Alistair Darling said ministers only became aware of the massive payout last week.
  
  UK Financial Investments – the body which manages taxpayers’ shareholdings in the part-nationalised banks – has been asked to look into clawing back some of the pension deal.
  
  But Sir Fred could end the controversy by giving it up.
  
  "The ball is in his court," Mr Darling said.
  
  Humiliating
  
  The news comes as RBS also announced it would be putting £325billion into the Government insurance scheme against toxic assets.
  
  Derek Simpson, joint leader of Unite, said: “These historic and humiliating losses bring into sharp focus just how reckless RBS’s former management team have behaved."
  
  Mr Darling said: “You cannot justify these excesses, especially when you have got such a failure of this magnitude.”
  
  Around £20billion of RBS’s losses is linked to write-downs on the acquisition of Dutch bank ABN AMRO — led by Sir Fred two years ago.
  
  He lost his job last year when the bank was bailed out. Treasury Committee chairman John McFall said: “There should be a claw back.”
  
  The Treasury is to pump an EXTRA£13BILLION into RBS, taking its stake in the company to about 84 per cent – up from 70 per cent.
  
  RBS must make £16billion available for lending, and £9billion must be used for mortgages.
  
  Tomorrow, Mr Darling will spell out plans to insure £250BILLION of toxic debts at Lloyds.
  Underwriting the debts means ministers will have put £1.3TRILLION of our money on the line to bail-out the banks in just six months.
  
  Mr Darling said: “We want to ensure that by cleaning up the balance sheet, that by making sure RBS has enough capital, we can get through this period.”
  
  He said RBS had also announced a restructuring of the bank, identifying parts that were “core” to its future.
  
  Mr Darling went on to acknowledge that there was a cost to the taxpayer, but added that the “cost of not doing it is absolutely colossal”.
  
  “You’ll remember that when Lehmans, that was a big investment bank in America, went down, that’s what precipitated the crisis in the world’s banking system," he said.
  
  “That’s what led to every government in the world having to recapitalise those banks because they were within hours of collapse.”
  
  Treasury officials were locked in frantic talks with bosses at the banks late last night thrashing out details of the bailout.
  
  Ministers hope the move will end the uncertainty swirling round our banks.
  
  Mr Darling said yesterday he wanted the banks to “clean up their balance sheets and rebuild for the future”.
  
  Meanwhile, house prices fell by a further 1.8 per cent during February, pushing the average cost of a home back below the £150,000 threshold.
  
  Nationwide Building Society said the average property in the UK was now worth £147,746 – £31,612 less than in the same month of 2008.
  
  The annual rate at which house prices are falling also continued to accelerate to hit a new record of 17.6 per cent.

More Pension Money For RBS's Sir Fred Goodwin

Published on UK Telegraph.

Anger over £8m pension top up for Sir Fred Goodwin

• Royal Bank of Scotland’s disgraced former chief executive has picked up an £8m pension top-up after being sacked by the lender for leading it to a £28bn loss last year, the largest in UK corporate history.
  
  The payment was made despite RBS and Sir Fred’s insistence that he received no compensation for loss of office after the taxpayer stepped in to rescue the bank. It means he is already drawing a pension for life of £650,000 a year at the age of 50.
  
  The revelation, by BBC business editor Robert Peston, comes on the day that RBS’s new management unveils the full horrors of its performance last year. New chief executive Stephen Hester has already said the bank, now 70pc owned by the state, made up to £28bn in losses in 2008. He will today detail plans to dump £300bn of bad and “non-core” assets into a ringfenced unit.
  
  Sir Fred is understood to be in discussions with the Treasury, UK Financial Investments – which manages the taxpayer’s bank stakes – and RBS about amending the pension top-up. The Treasury said in a statement: “This is another example of the culture of rewards for failure that we are determined to sweep away for the future.
  
  “We are committed to cleaning up the banking system – both the financial balance sheets and the behaviour of those that lead them.”
  
  Sir Fred’s payment, which almost doubles to £16m the £8.4m his pension had earned by 2007 after 10 years on the board, was agreed by the previous management. An RBS spokesman said: “The company is taking further legal advice in respect of certain aspects of Sir Fred Goodwin’s contractual arrangements and continues to discuss the position with UKFI.”
  
  Before the Treasury Select Committee this month he said: “My pension is the same as everyone else in the bank who is in a defined benefit pension scheme.” However, it is believed he and other board members were given special terms that boosted their pension from the age of 50.
  
  The Treasury added that it has been “vigorously pursuing with the new chairman [Sir Philip Hampton] whether there is any scope for clawing back some or all of this pension entitlement” and has “a view to testing any potential for legal redress”.
  
  The bank’s new management will today reveal plans to use taxpayer insurance for £300bn of toxic debts under the Government’s “Asset Protection Scheme”, full details of which are expected alongside the results. In return, RBS may have to meet draconian targets such as monthly lending levels. The Government will apply the same pressure to Lloyds Banking Group and any other bank which uses its insurance for toxic assets. The issue of forced lending has been the subject of intense debate with some banks claiming there actually is considerable credit available – the problem is now demand.
  
  Banks may put up to £600bn of toxic assets into the scheme. Given the enormous sums involved, politicians are determined to extract meaningful promises from banks to increase lending, in the hope it will help reverse the economic downturn.
  
  RBS will also announce that Nathan Bostock, a senior executive at high street bank Abbey, will run a new subsidiary. Mr Bostock is a former colleague of Mr Hester.

The horror stories simply continues!

Update on US Home Markets

Saw this article on MSN.

Hard landing for the housing market

• Housing starts tumbled in October, the government said Friday, falling to levels not seen since July 2000....
  
  Housing dive is a shocker
  The government said starts fell to a seasonally adjusted annual pace of 1.49 million new homes, down 14.6% from September and 27.4% from October 2005.
  
  Bloated inventories and weakening home sales contributed to the drop. Economists had been looking for a 5.6% fall to a 1.67 million annual rate.
  
  Home-building permits fell for the ninth month in a row, dropping more than 6% to the lowest pace since December 1997. The drop in permits, which are often a measure of builder confidence in the real estate market, is a signal that housing starts could continue to fall -- and a sign that the slump isn't over yet.
  
  "This is a shocking number," Phillip Neuhart, an economist at Wachovia, told Bloomberg News. "The market is going to remain weak well into next year."
  
  Other economists said the decline was not such terrible news. "The faster builders address their bloated inventories and bring the pace of home construction down, the quicker the housing correction will play out and the economy can return to a more normal footing," Stephen Stanley, the chief economist for RBS Greenwich Capital, told MarketWatch.com.
  
  The sharp slowdown in housing this year stands in stark contrast to the past five years, when the lowest mortgage rates in four decades powered a housing boom that pushed sales of both new and existing homes to five consecutive records.
  

And on the FSO write-up, Michael Hartman has the following remarks. ( Housing Numbers, Inflation & Interest Rates, Options Expiration and Gold )

• Though the rate of construction has declined, the big problem is a rising inventory of homes for sale as actual sales decline. New home sales are expected to fall to 1.06 million units this year from an all-time high of 1.28 million units in 2005. Notice the discrepancy in the number of homes being built on an annualized basis at 1.5 million units versus the expected sales of 1.1 million units.
  
  Supply and demand dictate that prices should continue to move lower. Eric Green, Chief Market Economist at Countrywide Financial made it clear by saying, “Inventories of unsold homes are off the charts.” Robert Toll, CEO of Toll Brothers said revenue for the current quarter is down 10%, but more alarming is the fact that their orders are down by more than 50% from the same period a year ago. According to a Bloomberg article today, Mr. Toll said in a conference call on November 7th that there are no signs that the U.S. housing market will recover soon. I have spoken with three mortgage bankers in the last week that I know personally. In candid conversations, they are saying it doesn’t look good, and all three expect foreclosures to increase next year. Increasing foreclosures will only add more inventories to unsold homes. In the minutes of the Federal Reserve meeting from October 24-25, the Fed-speak language uses the wording, “Further adjustment in the housing market appear likely.”
  
  Rather than continue beating a dead horse with more quotes and data on the weak housing numbers, if you care to look into more detail from a bigger-picture perspective, please see Chris Puplava’s Wrap-up posted two days ago. Chris went into great detail with economic charts covering the last 20-30 years, with some of the data going back to the Fifties. Looking at the longer-term picture, it does appear we have a long way to go to absorb the massive run-ups in residential real estate over the last few years.