Credit crunch update...

[mrph]

Bradford & Bingley is to be nationalised - "the Treasury will almost instantaneously sell to a bank or a number of banks".

According to the BBC, this means that every building society floated on the stock market in the past two decades will have collapsed or been sold to a conventional bank. Something about that fact seems a little bit depressing.

Comments

[pope-ant.livejournal.com]

I suspect that the reason the demutualised societies have failed is that it was only the smaller societies that fell victim to 'carpet bagging' and hence demutualisation - because they are still small they fell. Nationwide (and some others) was much bigger than average and this bought it enough time to ammend its rules before the carpet baggers got it. It now has rules to protect it from such action (up to a point).