Royal Bank of Scotland posts £2bn loss: market reaction Richard Hunter, head of equities at Hargreaves Lansdown: For the core businesses, there were some strong performances, such as the Retail & Commercial unit, and as a whole the core made a profitable contribution. However, the Greek and PPI writedowns hurt the overall performance, the cost/income ratio even within the core ticked up to 60pc (56pc) whilst the return on capital decreased to 10.6pc (11.3pc). Even though these two key metrics compare favourably with the recent Barclays numbers, RBS has challenges which Barclays does not. Government interference has been unwelcome and distracting, whilst any return to a dividend payment remains a pipedream. The UK taxpayer is learning to be patient. An FY11 attributable loss of £2bn is 120pc worse than consensus, with Non-Core and GBM losses in Q4 worse than expected. tNAV falls to 50.1p. RBS (deservedly) rallied by 67pc from November lows as scare stories around capital were finally banished. But the earnings outlook remains problematic. Robert Law, Nomura: The overall tone is relatively cautious in terms of guidance for the 2012 outlook and the deferral/reduction of longer-term profitability targets. While neither of these is surprising, we view this as negative for the UK banks and consensus expectations. Carla Antunes da Silva, Credit Suisse: Underlying results were in line with us but below consensus. The main focus will be on the new group targets and the detail of the GBM restructuring - here for us, this is less aggressive restructuring than our scenario analysis and so having outperformed the sector by c.18pc year-to-date we expect the stock to give back some of this performance.