Two resets re-priced today and both saw interest rates fall again - IFTHA to 4.22% (from 4.99%) and ASBPB from 4.78% down to 4.0%. However, it's an unpredictable process as benchmark has been up and down over the last year and at one stage looked like they might head higher. Still, term deposits have mostly come off too, unless investing with remaining finance companies and opting to reinvest at the considerably higher risk of "no guarantee".

Re Rabobank, I'm afraid I'm going entirely from memory here, so maybe wrong, but I thought the PIIGS sovereign debt exposure was about €490m or so last I looked on assets of €6.2bn. Enough to cause some stress to equity levels if it was all written down, but would have to be pretty extreme scenario. Worst exposure though would be to private mortgage debt which was over 40% of assets - although think they would probably have a reasonable pick of "good" mortgages and avoid the worst. Obviously, enough extreme scenarios, every bank ends up nationalised and haircuts all round. But would have to hope the ECB finds a printing press before things get quite that extreme.

I don't see the harm in having a few re-sets to offset the fixed rates for those of us with below average foresight having to make decisions about where to invest. All scenarios at the moment involve making predictions as to which direction overseas leaders will jump when the train gets close enough. And there are many investors that need more than the 3% of an on-line call account to avoid eroding capital in the need for income while we wait to find out. The scenarios where RBOHA actually take a defined haircut would have to be pretty extreme, although given they don't have a maturity date, there is probably increased odds they will live up to their perpetual name for the next 10 years....the whole point is to give Nan income so she doesn't have to sell the notes for income in the meantime.