Everything seemed to go back to front over the weekend

On Friday, legendary investor Jim Rogers was reported as saying the UK was a basket case. The ONS revised its estimate of the UK’s GDP upwards, and RBS made profits of £5.7 billion.

That Monday morning feeling has bitten deep. For it appears that just about everything was wrong. What we were told, and what really happened, were apparently two quite different things. It just goes to show, be cynical about everything.

Reversal number one, it appears someone forgot one of the golden rules of PR. The golden rule says don’t sent out a press release without running it past the client first. And don’t, whatever you do, attribute a quote to your client without checking it with him or her first.

Apparently, the release with the wrong quote was sent out by the organisers of a conference that Mr Rogers is attending. The words of Vince Stanzione, the man who apparently penned the original release, say it pretty well. He said that Mr Rogers “is obviously a little bit upset because he’s saying some of these statements are harsher than he would like to say.”

Meanwhile, Jim Rogers himself told the Wall Street Journal: “I do not think the pound sterling is going to collapse within the next few weeks. I’m on record as saying the U.K. has serious problems, serious debt problems, and the pound sterling has got problems, too.” But he went to some pains to emphasise that he doesn’t think the UK is necessarily any more seriously exposed that several other major economies, such as the US.

So that’s a relief then. It appears Jim Rogers doesn’t think the UK is exclusively a basket case, merely that the UK is one of many such cases.

Reversal number two is a tad irritating.

The ONS released its second estimate of GDP for the final quarter of 2009 on Friday, and the data it revealed was hailed with relief. The UK expanded by 0.3 per cent in the quarter, not 0.1 per cent as previously thought. Hurrah for that.

It is just that the story is not that simple. The ONS also revised downwards its estimates for previous quarters. And in fact, the total value of GDP measured in pounds, shillings and pence was marginally lower than previously estimated. (If you are interested in these things, the ONS now has Q4 GDP coming in at £315.7 billion.)

So it all boils down to this: Q4 saw better growth than originally thought, but its total value was smaller than originally thought. Umm, on balance that seems like bad news, and rather blows out of the water the celebratory mood the releases originally created.

Finally, we get the profits at RBS. Last week we were told the bank made a profit of £5.7 billion. You may recall, it planned to fork out £1.3 billion in bonuses.

The snag is, the bank had previously separated its assets into core and non-core. And losses made in ‘non-core’ areas no longer show up in the bank’s P&L. According to the Telegraph, “investment banking impairments dumped in the ‘non-core’ bank totalled £4.7bn.”

In other words, if we were to really compare like with like, RBS made a profit of a mere £1 billion, not the £5.7 billion presented.

This idea of separating core and non-core assets, or to put it another way, hiving off the toxic assets, does have its merits. By doing this, the bank is able to write off its losses more rapidly, which in turn means it can rebuild all the more quickly. One of the problems often cited with Japan is that banks were far too slow to recognise the extent to which their assets had lost value. So the RBS scheme has merits. But see the profits in the context of £1.3 billion being paid out in bonuses, and things don’t look so good.