British chancellor George Osborne outlined something a strategy for removing bailed out banks Lloyds and RBS from state ownership in his Mansion House address last night.
Peter Brown, Founder of the Institute of Financial Trading said selling off the 39% stake in Lloyds was widely anticipated.
"Lloyds have been quite aggressive in cleaning up its balance sheet and is well down the road to getting back privatisation," he said.
The future of RBS - which is the parent of Ulster Bank - will depend on the outcome of a three month review.
"They are looking at the possibilities of setting up a bad bank and taking toxic assets off the balance sheets, including Ulster Bank.
“If Ulster ended up with a clean balance sheet it would put them well ahead of the curve. It would be in a very competitive position to fund themselves at a very cheap level and take on new business."
Mr Brown dismissed suggestions that the Government might be asked to take on some of the liabilities of Ulster Bank.
"Ulster is a subsidiary of RBS, which is a UK bank. That would be the same as a Bank of Ireland branch in New York losing money and us asking the Americans to pay for it. The ownership and responsibility for losses lies with the parent company."
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Eurozone finance ministers will meet today to decide when and how the bailout fund - the European Stability Mechanism or ESM - can invest in a bank to save it from failure.
Ireland will be watching this with great interest here because there were hopes and an agreement of sorts that the ESM might take stake in our bailed out banks, letting the taxpayer off the hook to some degree.
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Asian markets fell back overnight following heavy losses on Wall Street.
It was all down to the words of US Federal reserve chief Ben Bernanke who announced that he would most likely taper off his monetary easing policies by the end of the year and they would stop completely in 2014.
That has involved him effectively increasing the flow of money in the economy to the tune of €85 billion per month which resulted in stock markets coming back to pre-crisis levels.
The reason for the planned move is that a modest recovery appears to be taking hold in the US economy but unemployment is still high - at 7.6% - and government spending cuts are taking their toll.
As well as depressing markets, Mr Bernanke's comments had the effect of driving up the cost of borrowing for the US.
Yields on 10-year Treasury notes jumped 0.126% points to 2.308%, the highest level since March 2012.
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Adding further to the gloom in market sentiment, manufacturing data from China overnight showed that the sector contracted in June to a nine-month low.
That fuelled concerns that the world's second-biggest economy is unable to halt a slowdown in growth and ease a worsening cash crisis.
