A Tale of Two British Banks

On the one hand there's Barclays, which today revealed that it doubled its 2008 profit, banking billions of pounds in 2009, largely thanks to the sale of its investment management unit, Barclays Global Investors, to BlackRock for a gain of nearly $10 billion.

On the other hand, there's the Royal Bank of Scotland, which revealed today that three more of its executives have fled the firm for safer and more profitable waters. RBS, 84 percent of which is owned by the U.K. government, has been losing bankers due to its inability to offer the types of bonuses paid out by some of its non-government-controlled competitors.