How quaint

The minutes of the meetings of the Court of the Bank of England during 2007 to 2009 (the great banking crisis) reveal that such an august body is not beyond schoolboy codes:

The banks in trouble were given code names. Alliance & Leicester, eventually taken over by the UK arm of Spanish bank Santander, was known as Tiger; Bradford & Bingley, part nationalised in September 2008, was Badger. RBS was dubbed Phoenix while Lloyds TSB was Lark to HBOS’s Fox.

Whatever next?