For anyone who thought the UK’s banking sector is finally out of the woods, the past few days have been something of a sobering experience.
Firstly RBS racked up another huge loss more than £630 million in the third quarter.
However, somewhat scarily, that was not the stand-out headline of the day.
Nor was the fact that two traders from the Gogarburn-based bank were reportedly suspended as a regulatory probe into alleged manipulation of the currency markets gathered pace.
Instead, the honours were shared between the decision to roll back from splitting the state-owned lender into good and bad banks the plan now is to internally ring-fence more than £38 billion of bad debts and RBS’s acknowledgement that it had failed small business and provided insufficient support to the UK’s economic recovery.
The RBS revelations all came in just one 24-hour period, and you could almost taste the agony dripping from new chief executive Ross McEwan’s carefully chosen words as he was forced to confront the lender’s latest problems head on.
Fast-forward through the weekend and, as memories of RBS’s late Halloween horror show began to fade, it was time for the Co-operative Bank to take centre stage.
The lender has been lurching from crisis to crisis in recent months under the weight of a £1.5 billion financial black hole.
On Monday it revealed details of its latest as in not the first rescue plan for the troubled institution.
The Co-operative Group, the UK’s largest mutual with interests ranging from funeral care to grocery stores, had been forced back to the drawing board after influential investors rejected the terms of an initial recovery plan that would have seen bondholders handed a minority stake in the business by agreeing to a half-billion-pound loss on their debt.
The new plan which is likely to be approved next month will see the Co-op hand over control of the bank to investors while retaining a 30% stake, making it the largest single shareholder in the new entity.
Although the bank itself will continue and its ethical lending stance will be legally protected, there is little to cheer from what is a sorry mess.
The Co-op bank found itself in increasingly hot water following the purchase of the Britannia Building Society at the height of the financial meltdown of 2009.
Its later aborted attempt to buy hundreds of Lloyds Bank branches a sell-off that was itself prompted by the serious financial problems that engulfed the lender and led to a taxpayer-backed bailout of the group simply served to mask the overriding issues which have now led to a situation where potentially thousands of ordinary Co-op bank workers’ livelihoods are now at risk.
In addition to RBS and Co-op’s continuing problems, the owner of the Clydesdale, National Australia Bank, announced this week that it had set aside £179 million in extra provisions for various mis-selling scandals, while HSBC said it had made £93m available to cover the costs of a review into investment advice given over a four-year period.
Even by the standards of the banking industry in recent years, it has been a whirlwind week.
But ultimately it would be wrong if the impression given over the last few days was that progress towards recovery in the sector was not being made.
It is just that restructuring some of the world’s most complex financial situations is a task akin to performing a U-turn in a supertanker.
Recovery and renewed stability for the UK’s banking sector is on the horizon.
However, as evidenced by the shockwaves of the last few days, it is still a journey with some distance to travel.