A tidy 925 million shares successfully jettisoned, a mere 7.5 billion still to go. The government’s sale of Royal Bank of Scotland paper worth £2.5 billion on Monday was a good effort in offloading the bank back into the private sector. But there’s a long way to go.
By modern standards, selling the remaining £20 billion-worth of taxpayer-owned paper should not be too demanding, especially since the Treasury has indicated that it is prepared to wait five years to be shot of RBS. The verdict on the placing, however, is not entirely positive. The 3.5 per cent discount to the prevailing price was larger than in the earlier placing of August 2015. That time the government had to accept only a 2.3 per cent discount.