Lloyds Banking Group has become the latest casualty of the bank sector sell-off as its shares plunged as much as 47%.Royal Bank of Scotland steadied a little after yesterday’s mammoth 67% fall, but doubts over the Government’s second bank bail-out and renewed fears for the sector’s health dragged its rivals lower.Lloyds, created only yesterday from the merger of HBOS and Lloyds TSB, was the worst hit, followed by Barclays down nearly 20%.The falls extend losses across the sector yesterday in light of news that RBS expects to report record annual losses, but also comes in the wake of the recent expiry of the short-selling ban.The FSA had until last Friday protected financial stocks from short-selling - when investors, typically hedge funds, borrow shares in a company which they then sell in the hope of buying them back later at a lower price.Lloyds came under attack following market talk that the group could be next in line to become majority owned by the Government.The group is currently 43% owned by the State after the first round of Government aid and experts have said there is a chance it will need to hand over further equity.RBS is to become 70% owned by the Government - up from 58% - after yesterday’s announcement that it will swap its £5 billion preference shares for ordinary shares.Lloyds is not thought to be included in this, with the group’s chairman, Sir Victor Blank, seeking to give assurance in an interview with Sky News late yesterday that he does not want the Government to take a bigger stake in the bank.However, fear is sweeping the market that further nationalisations and big losses are on the cards.Sandy Chen, Panmure Gordon analyst, said: “The Government’s rising equity stake in RBS is an indicator of the path ahead for other UK banks as well, driven by further losses.”Another downbeat note today from Merrill Lynch suggested Lloyds was in line for a hefty hit from bad-debt provisions.RBS estimated yesterday that its bad debts and write-downs on the value of past acquisitions could put it as much as £28 billion in the red - higher than the current record of £15 billion set by mobile phone group Vodafone in 2006.Investors were astounded by RBS’s potential losses and were further spooked when the bank admitted that more credit write-downs “seems certain“, but was unable to say when or by how much.Barclays and HSBC, the only major high street banks not yet to receive state aid, have also come under pressure.HSBC said yesterday that it did not see a need to draw on Government aid, but suffered steep falls in Hong Kong overnight amid growing fears that it will have to raise further cash to offset potential losses.It shares fell 2% today, but the wider FTSE 100 Index struggled for direction, flitting between positive and negative territory.Howard Wheeldon, senior strategist at BGC Partners, said the market had given a poor reaction to the Government’s latest attempt to shore-up banks.He said: “The past day appears to be when markets finally decided to call the bluff of both the banks and the Government as they searched for yet another possible nationalisation scalp.“Market behaviour sent a firm yet very precise, if somewhat unfortunate, message to the Government that they neither believe the latest bail-out plan will work nor, perhaps more importantly, that it is affordable and that it potentially contains too much risk.”Read
