The More Things Change...

One year ago this month I sat in a large auditorium with my fellow Citizens Bank employees and listened to our esteemed leader Ellen Allemany tell us how she was a integral cog in the banking/political machine that saved the Western world from falling into chaos during the banking crisis in the fall of '08. She went on to tell us all that "we" as in Citizens Bank and RBS were above the types of banks that had put us in this predicament. In fact she stated, RBS and Citizens would be the ones out there buying up banks and assets in the near future...

Fast forward a single month to mid/late December of '08 and...shocker, come to find out, Citizens had taken some big losses and RBS?? Wow, they were in serious trouble and would eventually need to be bought out by the nice citizens of Britain who currently own like 98% of the failed institution which went from the largest banking organization in the world to a shell of a joke of a sham all in the space of six months. We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands upon thousands of jobs here.

Jobs? Oh, yeah, jobs...I was dumped from mine at Citizens in January of '09 as Citizens was forced to shed expenses and departments to cut costs and raise capital for its more distressed English parent. Fortunately ten months later I've landed on my feet in a better job for more pay and better benefits. The ironic thing is that between the severance package I got and unemployment and such, I got to spend ten straight months with my son and actually ended up in a better job and am better off financially than I ever would have been at this point with Citizens...

Which brings us back to our title...

If you have been paying attention to the financial world in the past week you will likely have heard about the problems that Dubai is having in paying its debt. The investment arm of the government of Dubai is defaulting on a $60 billion required payment and asking for an additional six months to come up with the coin. And guess who is the largest owner of Dubai debt?? That's right...RBS. Those lucky British taxpayers are getting it in the rear end again. After bailing out the bank earlier this year, firing Sir Fred Goodwin and trying to shore up the long running institution they will now be required to pony up again as RBS continues its downward spiral with the default of one its largest payees.

So, Citizen Bank employees and customers...you thought your job and all those fees sucked big time already?? Well, wait till RBS gets through with the upcoming round of cost cutting and fee raising to pay for this little mistake...

Of course, Ellen, Fred and Stephen Hester (current CEO of RBS who, interestingly, has sold hundreds and hundreds of thousands of RBS shares in the last year while not buying a SINGLE one...) could actually be honest with their employees and customers and tell them that they are undercapitalized, in bad shape and likely to fail without a further massive infusion of capital from either the British citizens or an incoming buyer...

But then...that would be the right thing to do...