The “help yourself” bank

The Royal Bank of Scotland is one of the United Kingdom’s largest banks. A few years ago it became insolvent and by any normal rule of business, if the shareholders were unable or unwilling to support it, the bank should have gone into insolvent liquidation. However, irony of ironies, the government deemed the bank too large to fail and supported it with so much cash that the government (or taxpayers more accurately) now owns 81% of the bank.