At least the trustees and members of Northern Rock's pension scheme should be glad at the news the UK government will nationalise the troubled retail bank, five months after it suffered a run on its deposits. Their retirement nest-eggs will carry a state guarantee.
The run on the bank led the scheme's trustees to reassess their assumptions, from which they concluded the scheme was not, as they had thought, in surplus but in deficit, to the tune of £100m (â¬133m). Moreover, they said, it would cost the bank £200m to get rid of the liabilities altogether by selling the scheme to a pensions buyout company.
