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As the dust settles on the Great British Bank Heist, with 10% now put on the market by regulators in Brussels, I've been picking through some bits of the wreckage.

In the infamous words of Whitehall spin registrar Jo Moore (where is she now, by the way?), Tuesday was a good day to bury bad news.

RBS took a media hit for its announcement of 3,700 branch jobs getting sawn off, starting next year. But it must have known that releasing the news at 5pm on Monday, the day before the big announcement, it would soon be overshadowed.

In came HSBC on Tuesday afternoon with another 1,700 job losses. And Barclays sneaked in a significant shake-up, though not many casualties, at the top level of its investment bank division.

Lloyds Banking Group, which came out of the European Commission's crackdown rather better than Royal Bank of Scotland, put out an interim trading statement about its third quarter. It didn't get much attention.

The figures on impairments remain astonishingly large. The retail end of the business, which deals with household finances and mortgages, is facing growing problems towards the end of this year and into next, as a result of rising unemployment. That means £2.5bn of losses during this year so far, up from £1.6bn in the same period last year.

The wholesale division, which includes business lending and commercial property, saw £3.2bn of third quarter write-downs, slowing down the rate of flow of red ink from the first half, when there were £9.7bn losses.

While things are getting less bad, look in more detail at insurance, based in Edinburgh and dominated by Scottish Widows, and things look rather uglier. New business on life, pensions and investment sales fell by 27% in the first nine months of the year, when compared with the first nine months of 2008.

Market conditions were "extremely challenging", particularly through independent financial advisers.

Even without counting the £11 bn write down on 'negative goodwill', Lloyds still expects to make a loss this year. This is what chief executive Eric Daniels called a "robust" performance in "challenging" times.

What about jobs? Well, let's quote the Lloyds statement in full, particularly for those who like an inventive euphemism for job losses:

"We have continued to make significant progress in capturing integration related cost savings and £250m of cost synergies and other operational efficiencies have already been realised in the first nine months of the year to support a target for 2009 which has now been increased to £450m. We expect these will represent annual run-rate savings of approximately £750m by the year-end, some £50m higher than our previously announced expected run-rate".

Translated: we're £50m ahead of our very large cost cutting target, with lots of job losses in there.

Friday morning brings the third quarter figures from Royal Bank of Scotland, with chief executive Stephen Hester still bruised by his encounter with first the European competition commissioner and the subsequent stock market reaction.

The other figure that has been overlooked in much of this has been the impact on Britain's public finances. We know that between £30bn and £40bn is being put into RBS and Lloyds to shore up their balances. Even more than that was expected, had there still been a need to insure nearly £600bn of toxic assets.

But because there is a transfer of risk from down the road until a re-capitalisation this year, the impact on the UK government is that its borrowing target for this financial year has just risen by £13bn.

As the target was already £175bn, who's going to worry about another 13?

Or indeed, another £25bn of quantitative easing/new money creation, as just announced by the Bank of England?