The Independent Commission on Banking has recommended wholesale reforms of Britain's banking system - with the big banks' high street operations to be ring-fenced.
Which raises the question, how much did - the bank bailouts actually cost us? And how much are they still costing us?
Fortunately, the National Audit Office has looked into this - with a report out in July this year. It shows the level of financial support given by the government to the Banks since 2009. The report tries to make an assessment of how much they still owe us now, after repayments, fees and interest. The headline figure is £456.33bn, down from £612.58bn in March 2010. The peak was a mighty £1.162 trillion. The total outstanding support is 31% of March's GDP.
This is what it looked like at its peak in 2009.
What kind of financial support is it?
Actual money is the smallest part: £123.93bn was provided in the form of loans or share purchases, which required a transfer of cash from the Government to the banks. Another £332.40 billion is in the form of guarantees, where the Government will only provide cash if things go badly wrong. According to the report:
Some £109.70bn is recognised in the Treasury's Statement of Financial Position, amounting to 89% of the Treasury's net assets
What are our stakes worth?
This shows what's happened to our cash investment - and doesn't take account of the recent catastrophic stock market falls.
How much has our investment gone down?
According to the report, the investment has gone down during 2010-11 by:
• £10bn of debt guaranteed by the Credit Guarantee Scheme has matured;
• Royal Bank of Scotland assets covered by the Asset Protection Scheme have
been reduced by £49.70bn through run-off of the portfolio, disposals, early
repayments and maturing loans, which has reduced the Treasury's share of the
exposure to the assets by £43.81bn
• the liquidity provided by the Special Liquidity Scheme has reduced by
£91bn due to contractual maturities and early exiting from the individual swaps
by participants
• guaranteed liabilities in the wholly-owned banks have reduced by £9.10bn
mainly due to maturing liabilities
• £2.46bn of loan repayments have been received from banks and the Financial
Services Compensation Scheme, offsetting an increase to the loans of £0.12bn
The full data is below - with more analysis over on Polly Curtis' Reality Check.
What can you do with it?
Summary table
Download the data
Can you do something with this data?
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