Jim Armitage: RBS, not Lloyds, will need a discount to tempt buyers

Gordon Brown’s sale of the country’s gold reserves was a famously terrible trade.

But at least he can say he had no way of knowing he was selling at what would soon prove to be a stupidly low price.

The same can’t be said of the discounted sale of Lloyds shares to the public.

Here, it is abundantly clear that selling the taxpayer’s stock at a discount of £100 million is utterly unnecessary.

Pension funds and other institutions are more than happy to pay full price, as today’s news that they’ve snapped up a further half a billion pounds’ worth at the going rate proves.