Learn › Economic history › The 2008 Financial Crisis
The 2008 Financial Crisis
Getting the money back
Seven steps, about ten minutes, and a question at each. You need no economics and no preparation, only a willingness to guess before you are told.
Step 1 of 7
Britain came out of the recession having lost more of its output than America and fewer of its jobs, and what paid for that was a pay rise that never arrived.
The question
Seventeen years after the state bought into two British banks, the last of the shares was sold. One bank returned what went into it and one did not.
Seven steps on what came back, on why the Office for Budget Responsibility has published the cost as a gain and as a loss, and on the three things that were changed afterwards.
What this module covers
Written for every level. Tap any underlined word for what it means, and open the boxes below for the economics behind each decision. If you already know the theory, skip both and the history reads straight through.
On 21 April 2017 the Treasury announced that all the money put into Lloyds Banking Group had come back.
The money went in as a : the state owned a piece of the bank rather than lending to it. A bank that makes a profit pays part of it out to whoever owns it. So money came back two ways.
The Chancellor put the amount injected into Lloyds during the financial crisis at £20.3 billion, and the amount received since selling began in 2013 at £20.4 billion.
Take a guess. You are not expected to know the answers, and being wrong is what makes a number stick.
The £20.4 billion that came back is more than the £20.3 billion that went in. What does the larger figure count?
The government provided about £45.5 billion to the Royal Bank of Scotland over the course of 2008 and 2009.
The state took shares for that money rather than a promise to pay it back. It gets it back only by selling those shares, and by taking whatever the bank pays out along the way.
The last of those shares was sold on 30 May 2025, in a bank by then called NatWest Group.
So the money went into the Royal Bank of Scotland over two years, and took seventeen to come back.
How much did the state get back in total from its shareholding in that bank?
For scaleLloyds returned £20.4 billion against the £20.3 billion that went into it.
British households had billions of pounds in that bank's London branch when it failed, and the state paid every one of them out.
The estate of a failed bank is what it still owns: loans people are paying off, buildings, cash. It is sold over years, and the proceeds go to whoever the bank owed, which by then included the British government.
The British government was paid out of that estate in stages, the last of them £740 million in January 2016.
The state paid out £4.5 billion to those households. Was what it eventually got back from the failed bank higher or lower?
A tie counts as correct either way.
For scaleAt that date the state still held shares in both of the British banks. It sold the last of them nine years later.
That was module 7 of 7, the last in The 2008 Financial Crisis
Your score will appear here.
[1] What the state put into Lloyds and what came back: HM Treasury, Taxpayers get all their money back from Lloyds, 21 April 2017.
[2] What the state put into the other bank and what came back, seventeen years later: Hansard, House of Commons, 3 June 2025, NatWest Group: Government Shareholding.
[3] What came back from the Icelandic bank's estate: The Landsbanki recovery, as recorded in the series' signed spine at link 43.
[4] What the whole rescue cost, on the count that takes in the most anybody publishes: Office for Budget Responsibility, Fiscal impact of the financial interventions, Economic and fiscal outlook, July 2015.
[5] The same question, answered three times, three different ways: Office for Budget Responsibility, Economic and fiscal outlook, November 2010 and December 2012.
[6] How much of their own money banks have to hold now: Bank for International Settlements, press release: Group of Governors and Heads of Supervision announces higher global minimum capital standards, 12 September 2010.
[7] The rule itself, and when it came fully into force: Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, Basel III: A global regulatory framework for more resilient banks and banking systems, December 2010 (revised June 2011).
[8] What the law now says the point of shutting a bank is: Banking Act 2009, section 4: the special resolution objectives.
[9] What a stress test is: Bank of England, Stress testing.
Country data from the World Bank (CC BY 4.0) and the UNDP Human Development Report (CC BY 3.0 IGO)
Games · Learn · Atlas · Privacy