Can somebody tell me where my house in America is please?

From: Nigel Boddy, Fife Road, Darlington.

BRITISH banks have lost a great deal of money in the United States. Can I point out please that the money went somewhere?

The Midland and NatWest both lost their shirts in the US and had to be bought by HSBC and RBS. Ironically, the RBS board of all people then went on to make a similar mistake.

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In the latest fiasco, RBS lost their shirts in the American market in almost identical circumstances to NatWest and Midland, albeit through buying a Dutch bank.

This makes our bankers’ lack of caution astonishing.

When will British banks learn not to venture into the shark- infested waters of American banking?

Is George Osborne getting our money back? Are the RBS board? What efforts are being made to get some money back? We, the British taxpayers, must own large numbers of houses in the US and, more importantly, the land on which they stand if we own RBS.

As a British taxpayer I’ve paid for so many US houses. If I’d wanted to own a house in America I’d have picked one out for myself.

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If I own one now I’d prefer to know where it is. Can someone tell me which one is mine? Since we will all be paying for this in years to come I will take the address of my US house now please if you don’t mind, so I can contact a letting agent out there and manage the situation.

Has my American house been standing empty these last four years, I’d like to know? Have the RBS board and successive governments been paralysed since this crisis started? Are they being paid to do a job when in fact they are doing nothing? Are they making the situation worse?

We need answers.

From: H Marjorie Gill, Clarence Drive, Menston.

IT does seem that a simple way of ensuring that bonuses given to managers of large public companies, such as banks, would be to make them take shares instead of cash.

One would have thought that anyone in charge of the fiscal regulators would have made 
this a priority system in the first case.

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Surely this would ensure 
that none of them would benefit if the business didn’t make progress and improvements, and would be for the benefit of the taxpayers and stop the outrage felt by everyone who is not on this gravy train?

From: M E Wright, Grove Road, Harrogate.

READERS once again voice outrage at the untrammelled greed of many bankers 
(Yorkshire Post, April 11) – 
more specifically HBOS, 
that once proud Yorkshire institution, the Halifax Building Society.

We might well be wondering if Margaret Thatcher would 
have responded more robustly, given these men’s gross 
betrayal of the trust which 
she invested in the financial sector – much more so than all 
her limp-wristed successors perhaps?

They have been strong 
on words and finger-
wagging, but pathetically 
weak when it comes to 
action.

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