What value an "unwanted asset"?

Bloomberg has issued a report based upon Britain's Sunday press ramblings from which comes the following:

Feb. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc plans to divide itself into a “good bank” and a “bad bank” and cut costs by more than 1 billion pounds ($1.44 billion) a year to help it recover from the biggest loss in British corporate history, The Sunday Times said, without citing anyone.

The cost-reduction measures will result in about 20,000 job losses, with more than half in the U.K, the newspaper said. The Sunday Telegraph reported RBS, the largest government-controlled U.K. bank, will establish a “non-core” subsidiary which will hold 300 billion pounds of “unwanted assets.” etc., etc.

Apart from sniffily proving the price of the newspapers in Britain are again this Sunday worth considerably less than the trash they pass on as free gifts what else may we learn from this report.

Possibly that the real loss of the taxpayers for RBS can at last be realistically estimated at 300 billion pounds. Consider this scenario - if I purchase a packet of plastic cutlery for one pound, find I have no use for it and store it unopened it might possibly at some future moment be worth something, how much can only be assessed were I to be lucky enough to find a willing buyer.

Were I to accidentally sit on the package and break the contents, they remain unused but their future value becomes even less certain no-one would believe they were now worth the original purchase price - most would put their value at zero.

So it is with all unwanted assets. The price paid is meaningless especially when preceded by the adjective "unwanted" which assigns a value of zero.

Who cared what was originally paid, only the robbed taxpayer who apparently had them transferred at the original cost paid.

Leave the debts in Scotland, that is where they rightfully belong! Losses should have been left with the original shareholders who at least had a limitation to their liability up to the value of their shares and to the capitalisation of the bank. Nothing more, how can the Scottish Brown and Darling have contrived to extend this to 300,000,000,000,000 pounds for mainly English taxpayers?