Taxpayer owned RBS cuts another 3,500 jobs

It's not enough. Squeeze every penny out of them.

Let the "fairweather friends" (as all bankers are) lose their houses, and their cheap staff finance rates and their cars and their pensions.

Welcome them to the real world. After all, that's what they have been doing to people for years.

Quite frankly, I detest them.

A bit harsh. Many many 'Bankers' simply work very hard in quite difficult circumstances and are nowhere close to any lending or investment decisions. More recent employees (last 5/6 years) have contributory Defined Contribution Pensions and would only get a car as part of a total salary package commensurate with other employers.

Take the example of a Manager or a bank Cash Centre where the money is physically counted, sorted and re-distributed with very strict regulation by the Bank of England who make frequent totally unannounced visits with strong sanctions for breaches whether systems failures or human error and where in excess of £2m of cash is handled daily. How can these people be tarred with the same naive and hurtful brush as 'all bankers' ? Or is that not what you actually meant Mr Greenhill.

I am ashamed to be working in the same profession as you are if either that IS your attitude or you are so ignorant and unthoughtful. I pity your clients.

Sorry, spouse of a banker. But you clearly have no working experience of what banks have been doing to hard working people and their businesses over the years - and RBS have been far from innocent.

My comments are specifically made in response to past events that I have witnessed.

And as for ignorant and unthoughtful, I am far from ignorant, having had many years of experience of working as employed, director/shareholder and self employed after gaining a double honours degree at university.

Unthoughtful? I have witnessed banks go back on their agreed lending and sending large companies into receivership with employees effectively losing their homes as a result.

In one instance I witnessed a bank manager being taken to play in a pro-am golf day with the client and his accountant, in order that the accountant could better explain the company's current needs and give an opinion. The bank manager did not honour the cheque paid to the golf club for the steak lunch that he enjoyed along with the round of golf.

Funding was verbally agreed subject to a personal guarantee secured on the client's house (which was duly done), the project was started and many weeks later when the funds were expected the bank manager said that the cash was not going to be forthcoming and the client was to put his business into receivership immediately.

The client was forced to put his business into receivership and the personal guarantee was invoked which resulted in him losing his house, all of his cash, his car, and every last asset he had.

I appreciate that is only one example, and a harsh one. But it is that kind of behavior from a so-called professional bank manager that riles me so much.

Unthoughtful? No. Vengeful? Yes.

I will not stand by and watch anyone get bullied. I will say exactly what I think, and if some take offence at that, then so be it.

And my clients know that I will do anything that I can to protect them. And we all know that there are a lot of absolute financial cons that most consumers need protection from, and we also know that the so-called regulators have failed not only the industry but also the clients.

And in my opinion, the client is the most important person in this and every other industry.

I am not surprised by your response which does not answer my comments in any way but simply re-inforces your own bullying opinions whereby you wish 'all bankers' to lose all their assets now and in the future based on the admittedly dreadful behaviour of lending bankers both institutional and retail. so sorry that I have to stick with 'unthoughtful'.

Incidentally surely (your?) client's accountant could have explained the business needs in the bank manager's office rather than from a putting green or a bunker -especially when the business was obviously so cash poor that even the cheque paid on that day was bounced (if I read correctly).

I totally agree with Dave Greenhill's comments re Banks & Bankers, I could spend the next week recounting stories of their dishonesty and greed, but the latest is: a client of mine looking to raise 100k to further develop one of his business properties - the bank offered to rebroke their existing lending of 600k so offering him 700k at a higher interest rate and with a 1.5% fee, effectively £10,500 fee on 100k borrowing!

Sorry Dave Greenhill and Carl Fletcher but you are about as out of touch with reality as the 'bankers' themselves. We are not taking about 'bankers' who are earning the big bucks playing with the markets that caused all the problems this country has.

We are talking about average people who are doing admin jobs in processing centre doing jobs like keying applications for current acounts onto databases etc earning £15,000 a year, or around that.

They are average people like you and me who will be wondering how they are going to pay the bills over the next couple of months.

You are clearly a very inteligent man, but engage the brain in this instance!

To spouse of a banker:

Thank you for your further comments. I would however have to say that what I witnessed in the example quoted was sufficient to make me exceptionally wary.

And yes, the firm was struggling with cash flow. But there was more to it than that, hence golf being used as the meeting place.

But the point is that the bank manager agreed to assist and allowed the client to go ahead with their recovery plan. When the extra cash was needed, the bank manager simply said that the cash was not going to be forthcoming and a receiver should be called in. This was on a holiday Friday at lunchtime and the client had to report to the bank at 9am on the Saturday (21 hours later!) to sign the receivership papers. By the Monday we had managed (along with the client's private efforts) to raise a promise of sufficient funds privately to largely repay the existing borrowing and asked the bank manager to destroy the papers. He refused.

However the recovery plan as approved by the accountant would not only have led to a full recovery, but profits of many millions of pounds per year thereafter. The net assets in that example were professionally valued at the request of the bank manger at around £400,000. The bank lending was around £70,000 and a further £50,000 was temporarily required, as at least £180,000 was due to come in from the sale of some of the assets. The bank manager said that he didn't believe the surveyors and insisted on a liquidation and the assets were virtually lost as they were sold at a distressed sale for around £20,000.

And as I had previously said, the client lost everything. And the most frustrating thing from my point of view was that I was completely powerless to intervene.

And to Carl Fletcher:

Thank you for your comments. I agree we could go on and on with many examples where banks have ridden roughshod over clients.

And that annoys us even more when these people get bailed out by the government, with ther "holier than thou" attitudes.

I don’t think anyone is arguing that there are fundamental flaws within the UK banking sector, a large proportion of these caused by the people who work in the industry and i agree i could cite many examples of banks offering a hand up with the left before beating down with the right.

i think it is unfortunate that it is everyday, honest, hardworking, people that work for companies like RBS are the ones that will suffer and lose their jobs, not the overpaid banker.

Like i said these are processing centres that are closing down, people have woke up this morning knowing that they will be out of work by the end of the year and not knowing where there mortgage/rent payment will come from!

A by product of this is it will likely lead to poorer and poorer customer service for us as there are less people working to do the day-to-day processing jobs we need.

To James E:

Thank you for your comments.

I agree with you for much of what you say. What worries me is the smokescreen of respectability that has for years been made available to the banks.

Having said that, in fairness there have also been many instances where local managers have excelled and local bank staff have excelled.

But they largely no longer exist.

Many senior managers saw the changes coming and took early retirement. This led to a dearth of experienced on-site managers and the birth of "processing centres".

And these senior managers were those that we had previously built good working relationships with.

Now we have call centres, account managers etc and very few experienced on-site managers. And as you have quite rightly pointed out, even that bubble is bursting.

The solution of course is never as easy as the criticism! Particularly when the banks are owned by the government, who really know very little outwith what their old school tie told them about the real world.