Outlook The Co-operative Group appears to have woken up to the challenge its banking arm faces, announcing more high-profile hires yesterday. It has brought in Richard Pennycock from Morrison's as finance director and Richard Pym, the former boss of Alliance & Leicester, to chair its bank.

One of Europe's highest-profile fund managers caught in Italy

Outlook Something up with Libor, you say? Sorry guv, not my problem, speak to the British Bankers' Association. This, in a nutshell, was the attitude of the Financial Services Authority when the issue was raised with it on 26 separate occasions, and perhaps as many as 74 where there were oblique or indirect references to the problem in FSA communications.

Taxpayers are unlikely to ever recoup the £66bn spent saving Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group from collapse, a committee of MPs has warned.

Next month is the fifth anniversary of HSBC releasing a trading statement that on the face of it looked fairly innocuous, but which contained this statement: "Deterioration in US housing markets is affecting consumer finance credit quality more broadly than hitherto and loan impairment charges are expected to remain high in these conditions. There is the probability of further deterioration if the current housing market distress continues and further impacts the broader economy."

The outgoing head of the financial services regulator claimed today that the run on Northern Rock could have been avoided if his advice had been taken to help Lloyds TSB take over the ailing bank.

UKFI said the sale to Virgin provided the most attractive outcome in terms of new competition in the UK banking sector

Northern Rock's period of public ownership should generate a profit of up to £11 billion for the taxpayer over the next 10 to 15 years, the body responsible for the Government's bank investments said today.

Ravi Sinha, the former boss of private-equity giant JC Flowers in the UK, has been fined £2.86m and banned from working in any kind of financial services business for life.

The deal

Newcastle have secured a new two-year shirt sponsorship deal with Virgin Money.

Surely, if we learnt anything from the "loans for peerages" story, which this newspaper helped to break six years ago, it was that party funding should be kept away from the honours system. Yet the New Year Honours list tries again to push that water back uphill.

Lloyds Banking Group today named the Co-operative as its preferred choice to buy the 632 branches it is selling under European competition rules.

Lloyds is in the final stages of reviewing offers from NBNK and the Co-Op for around 630 of its branches. The part-nationalised bank is expected to hold a board meeting on Thursday to discuss a final decision over the branch sell-off, which has been code-named Project Verde.