[dorlomin]

What about 10 years ago was Lloyds, TSB, Halifax building society and Bank of Scotland seem about to become on huge mega institution.
link

The entity would posses 27% of the UK morgage market? Ok then.

But HBOS is currently getting crucified by the markets, not so much (I think) on losses due to subprime CDOs and CDS exposures but that it is reliant on capital markets for liquidity.

[drgoodword]

The HBOS buyout illustrates the unprecedented depth of the current global economic crisis.

From The Scotsman:

FOR Scotland's oldest bank, it was the suddenness of its rout that stunned. That and the silence at the top. That and the invisibility of leadership. That and the short-selling frenzy that descended on HBOS shares yesterday, like vultures on a corpse.
This was the blackest day in Scottish banking. An appalling day of shock, confusion and disbelief.

Many this morning will still be aghast at the speed of the bank's share collapse. Anger and a reckoning will come later. Today, the fate of HBOS, the savings of its 22 million customers, the prospects for its 72,000 staff and the final reckoning for its 1.2 million hapless investors – whose shares have been savaged – rest on the merger with rival Lloyds TSB.

(snip)

Bank of Scotland, formed in 1695 and merged with the Halifax to form HBOS less than a decade ago, was a bank that loved its history.

Its founding constitution and articles are kept like sacred relics in a special glass container and screened off behind a polished wooden panel near the boardroom in the bank's recently refurbished headquarters on The Mound in Edinburgh.

THE bank has survived European revolutions, agricultural depressions, two world wars, stock market crashes and too many recessions to mention. Now it has succumbed to the greatest convulsion in financial markets since 1929.

It's going to be a long, hard Kondratieff winter, and then we get to deal with the down slope of peak oil.

[Quinny]

And the poor chief exec is going to be really struggling!

HBOS chief exec's share deal

but at least he'll keep his job, poor soul!