Why is the government still backing the Lloyds-HBOS deal?

Lloyds TSB's takeover of HBOS is a bad deal for Lloyds shareholders and a bad deal for the taxpayer. The government should call a halt right away, says John Stepek.

When the financial crisis kicked off, Lloyds TSB shareholders could have been forgiven for feeling a bit smug.

Their bank had been decried as the dullest in the sector. While its peers threw money into sub-prime derivatives and rampant expansion of mortgage lending, the only thing going for Lloyds TSB was its large dividend payment.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.