On what basis can anyone say he has failed?
from the BBC article..
On the more positive side, there are several to note.
The bank is now making money. For the first nine months of 2011, RBS made pre-tax profits of £1.2bn.
The bank says that all of its core businesses are now profitable, other than its Northern Irish unit, Ulster Bank.
RBS's ratio of assets - loans and investments - to its loss-absorbing equity capital is a fraction more than 20 times, down from 50 times in the autumn of 2008 when it was rescued. (According to the BBC's business editor Robert Peston, in 2008 a fall in the value of its assets of just 2% was enough to sink it. Today, its assets would have to be written down by 5%.)
RBS's balance sheet has been reduced by more than £600bn since 2008.
RBS has lent more than £68bn to UK companies in the nine months to September 2011, including over 40p in every £1 lent to small businesses in the UK compared with a much lower customer market share.
The bank's ratio of the loans it has made to deposits is 112%, down from 154% more than three years ago.
It has increased its portfolio of liquid assets (which it assets that can supposedly be turned into cash in a crisis) from £155bn to £170bn.
But critics of Mr Hester also have some points.
Mr Hester has conceded that it will take longer than the promised five years for RBS to revive the bank - which is effectively breaking one of his key promises since taking control of the bank.
Under Mr Hester, its shares have fallen substantially to about 27p currently. Its stock fell 48% last year. In 2007, RBS shares were worth about 370p.
The bank is worth less than half what taxpayers paid for the shares when rescuing the group. UK taxpayers injected £45.5bn of new capital into RBS. At recent share prices, that investment has fallen in value by a painful £27bn.
In 2011, the bank's return on equity fell from 14% to 12% and the cost-to-income ratio rose to 59% from 56%. (The 2013 targets for those two measures are 15% and less than 50%, respectively, from which RBS seems far away.)
Evaluating the performance of a chief executive is never easy.
But when the bank he is running was one of the world's biggest and had imploded, it becomes even harder.
OK..let's look closer at one of the much-harped on about share price. Let's take a look at what's been happening to other UK banks over the same period. Take LloydsTSB....also with a tax payers cash injection.....March 2010 65p Jan 2012 32p. Same ratio of share price fall. Share prices particularly of ALL banks have taken a hammering because of external events such as the Euro crisis. It is a pointless exercise by the BBC to quote the share price in 2007 FFS....but then the BBC always was a bit tabloid. But in any event, LloydsTSB in 2007 was 316p.
Hester is doing alright....witch hunts, apart.
