Jim Armitage: McEwan has much to cheer, but must he splash the cash?

Before carping about the state of RBS, remember what an utter mess chief executive Ross McEwan inherited.

His firefighting predecessor Stephen Hester did admirably to turn £24 billion of annual losses into an underlying profit.

But the bank was still crippled by billions of pounds of misconduct fines, a dysfunctional collection of creaking IT systems and the need to hive off hundreds of branches at the behest of European regulators.

So, for all the complaints in some quarters of the investment world today that his restructuring costs are running higher than expected (£1.5 billion for 2019), that’s surely outweighed by the bank’s surprisingly strong performance on profit and returns on equity.

Best of all, the bank’s impairments for loans-gone-bad have come out at a full £170 million lower than analysts had feared.

The Kiwi done good.

That being said, you have to question his wisdom in now handing a bumper £1.6 billion of RBS’s money back to shareholders when he’s clearly convinced the British economy is about to take a nasty tumble.

If he’s right and Britain is in for an even rougher ride than the Bank of England reckons, businesses will stop borrowing and start defaulting. Ditto householders. Impairments will start rising.

McEwan says the bank is throwing off so much cash, it’s only right to give some back — especially now he’s through the worst of the regulatory fines.

The worry has to be that he could end up needing that money again in a year or so.

He may rue the day he decided to be so generous.