Gordon Brown suffered a double blow yesterday when government statisticians recalculated Britain's national debt at £1.5tn and the CBI accused the prime minister of lacking a coherent economic recovery strategy. As the prime minister warned in Rome that the world was being hit by an "economic hurri...

The government's rescue of some of Britain's biggest banks will push up the national debt by as much as £1.5 trillion, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) announced this morning. Alongside a grim assessment of the state of the public finances - which suggests Alistair Darling's borrowing forec...

As banking heavyweights like Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group topple like dominos it is easy to forget Northern Rock the Newcastlebased middleweight with which the crisis began....

Lloyds could be forced to write off a further swath of loans made by HBOS to hundreds of companies, after figures showed many of the loans are worth only a fraction of their original value. The troubled bank has made huge loans to commercial property developers, hotel chains and leisure companies, a...

A shock profits warning by Lloyds Banking Group knocked 32% off the bank's share price today and raised speculation that the taxpayer may be forced to take a majority stake in the banking giant created with the intervention of Gordon Brown. Eric Daniels, chief executive of the bank formed just under...

The Royal Bank of Scotland infuriated unions tonight by announcing plans to cut 2,300 jobs only hours after its former chief executive Sir Fred Goodwin had publicly apologised for the Edinburgh-based bank's downfall. At a packed meeting of the Treasury select committee of MPs, Goodwin had been joine...

Disgraced banking boardroom executives at HBOS walked away with cash payments worth hundreds of thousands of pounds each, the Guardian has learned. Executives were handed the cash after HBOS was rescued by Lloyds TSB and the takeover formally activated a "change of control" clause in their contracts...

Bank shares plummeted today amid concerns that the latest government package to stabilise banks and encourage lending would not solve the deepening economic crisis. Royal Bank of Scotland was the biggest faller in the FTSE 100 share index, its price collapsing by more than 70%, to 10p, after it warn...