I am going to repeat stuff from sister blog!!

I am going to repeat stuff from the sister blog "Accountancy Distilled", which today looked at the gold price. This has rallied 12 per cent since India bought 200 metric tonnes from the IMF in early November and is now $1,180.50 an ounce. This blog is not an investment newsletter with recommendations as such but the gold price probably shows us that there are quite a few nervous investors out there. You can buy
physical gold, gold certificates, gold futures, gold coins, gold jewellery and the shares of gold miners. I don't have any of these gold-linked assets but I wish I had a few Victorian
sovereigns for sentimental value.
The "Accountancy Distilled" blog started off with a bit of a rant against Gordon Brown in who,in his former incarnation of British Chancellor, ordered the independent Bank of England to sell gold at $252 an ounce against its advice. I suppose if the British central bank was not so spineless there could have been a few resignations about it but why walk the plank early when the pensions are so juicy?
I suppose now is not the time for IFAs to recommend gold purchases to their clients following the sharp rise. However, maybe it is not the time to be in fixed income gilts. This is not a recommendation but perhaps an observation!! Inflation is already rising quite sharply (petrol prices, New Year VAT increase) and if the Bank of England does not support the pound with an interest rate rise or two, then things
could get quite interesting.

Would it have been cheaper to nationalise RBS?

With state control of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) creeping up to 84 pct, I wonder if it would have been cheaper to nationalise the bank? This might have created a hornet's nest between London and Edinburgh but it might have been cheaper, since it looks like the bank is going to be broken up anyway. Selling insurance assets like Direct Line won't making it any easier to repay taxpayer support and kow-towing to the European Commission shows how weak the government is.
Probably the UK government's balance sheet would not have been big enough to formally take on the RBS assets but state control might have avoided the furore about banker bonuses. The UK Treasury is probably regretting its disinterest in RBS taking over ABN Amro, where it looks like Spanish bank Banco Santander waltzed off with the best assets of the Dutch group while the British bank just took on board a lot of toxic debt.
The UK government did at least save the banking system a year ago since the economy could not have coped with the collapse of RBS or of the Halifax. It is a shame that taxpayers and bank employees are going to pay dearly for the mistakes of the past.