ALDI has revealed it is changing the way customers can get hold of its Specialbuy products. The budget supermarket has made changes due to the current coronavirus crisis.

IT SIMPLY defies both belief and description. The coronavirus scare is like nothing anyone currently living on this planet has ever encountered - and we all need to get used to a world that will change forever. At the time of writing, both the number of those infected and, tragically, the tally of those who do not survive continue to rise sharply.

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You might have noticed that my mind (and body) have been away from the day job. But I am so gobsmacked by the comprehensive defeat of the banks in the PPI case that my fingers felt compelled to tap on smartphone keys.

What probably matters most is that the judge has ruled against the banks on all important issues.

And two really mattered: first that the Financial Services Authority's principles governing the behaviour of financial firms are a proper basis for compensation awards; and that FSA rules based on those principles are necessary but not sufficient for judging whether financial firms engaged in mis-selling.

Frankly if the banks had succeeded in proving otherwise, it would have been utterly disastrous for the whole system of consumer protection in the UK, both the existing system and the new one being erected by the government.

As it turns out, it is the implications of today's ruling for the banks that are serious.

Unless they appeal (and I will come back to that question) they face having to make compensation payments of around £4bn to around two and a half million people (around a quarter of all PPI policies were allegedly mis-sold).

The damage is greatest for the two banks in which we as taxpayers have big stakes, Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland (which is just dandy for all of us) - largely because they have the largest shares of the retail banking market.

Lloyds faces the biggest bill: both it and RBS look as though they will have to pay compensation in excess of £1bn each.

That Lloyds and RBS appear to have done the most mis-selling in this instance will be seen by some as further evidence that their particularly powerful positions in retail banking is bad for the welfare of consumers - it will be taken as strengthening the argument of the Independent Commission on Banking that reinforcing competition is a priority (see my recent posts Banking Commission wants firewall around retail banking and Banking Commission: Retail banking must be ring-fenced).

The tab for Barclays and HSBC will also be pretty steep - some hundreds of millions of pounds each.

Given that few lawyers in my acquaintance rated the banks' chances of winning the case terribly highly, it is slightly odd that they used the courts to minimise or delay making restitution - especially at a time when they are not exactly the most popular institutions in the UK.

It is even more curious that they have fought and fought to limit their liability in the light of the two main examples of mis-selling identified by the FSA.

First there were all those refusals to make payouts under the loan insurance plans to those who had a pre-existing medical condition - when it is clear that relevant customers had no idea that pre-existing medical conditions were grounds for non-payment.

Second, it is a logical absurdity that the policies should have been sold by the banks to the self-employed, given that is impossible for a self-employed person to be made redundant.

So what next? Well the banks could make those two and a half million victims of mis-selling wait another couple of years to be made whole by appealing to the Supreme Court.

Or they could take the view that the prospects of winning in any court are too slim to outweigh the potential for further damage to their respective public images from being seen to defy an unambiguous legal judgement that they let down millions of their customers.

Unless of course they regard their reputations as so impaired that there's nothing left to lose from prevarication.

Lloyds has decided not to use the courts any further to contest the decision of the regulator, the Financial Service Authority, that it should pay restitution to customers who were mis-sold PPI loan insurance.

This will be welcomed by thousands of Lloyds customers, although it will be very expensive for Lloyds - which is making a provision of £3.2bn to cover the likely costs.

That £3.2bn charge means Lloyds is back in loss, to the tune of £3.5bn on a statutory or official basis.

My post from last night explains much of the background to this.

Ignoring one-offs, on what Lloyds calls a combined business basis, Lloyds remained in profit, to the tune of £284m, for the first three months of the year - although this was well down on the £1.1bn made in the equivalent period of last year.

There was also a charge of £1.1bn to cover the expected cost of Irish loans going bad. This was £500m more than expected.

The reason for the higher than anticipated Irish lending loss is that the new chief executive Antonio Horsa-Orsorio decided to factor in a further possible fall of 10% in Irish commercial property prices.

Other striking characteristics of these figures for the first quarter of the year is that net lending to small businesses rose, bucking the national trend, and overall income was down from £6bn to £5.2bn.

What stands out however is Lloyds' decision to settle with PPI claimants.

It was a unilateral decision, but will put pressure on the other banks to do the same.

The size of Lloyds charge implies that the big British banks will in total take a £9bn hit to settle PPI claims, with Royal Bank of Scotland, the second most exposed, perhaps taking a £2bn hit.

Update 09:21: For taxpayers, it is good news that Lloyds has been weaning itself off loans and loan guarantees provided by us.

So in the first three months of the year, there was a further reduction of £26bn of funding for Lloyds in effect provided by the state.

Which means that Lloyds' residual dependence on de facto loans from us is £70bn - with £26bn of this still owed to the Bank of England's Special Liquidity Scheme and £44bn of debt guaranteed by the Treasury (under the Credit Guarantee Scheme) still needing to be repaid.

Barring a meltdown in wholesale markets, Lloyds should be free of exceptional taxpayer funding support by the target of 2012.

By contrast, the timetable for privatising taxpayers' 41% stake in Lloyds is yet to be decided - although today's decision by the new chief executive to face up to the mistakes of the past (the PPI and Irish losses) should make privatisation easier.

The next milestone for Lloyds on the road away from state ownership and influence will be the announcement in June of Mr Horta-Orsorio's new strategy for the group.

Update 09:54: Royal Bank of Scotland will not make a decision till next week on whether to join Lloyds in agreeing to settle PPI cases.

It had the second biggest share of the PPI market, with around 20%, compared with 35% for Lloyds.

My banking sources are surprised by the magnitude of the PPI charge taken by Lloyds. It was significantly bigger than they had expected.

They would expect RBS to eventually take a PPI hit of around £1bn (as I mentioned in a post last month) rather than the £2bn implied by Lloyds' PPI provision.

That said, it is highly unlikely that RBS will quantify the potential PPI damage when it announces its first quarter results tomorrow.

On RBS's imminent results, I would expect it still to be in the red at the statutory level, including - for example - a debit from a market valuation of credit insurance provided to RBS by taxpayers under the Asset Protection Scheme.

But at the operating level it will be in profit. And RBS's general insurance operations should be back in the black (some would say 'at last') - which matters, because RBS is committed to dispose of these well-known insurance activities, probably by floating them on the stock market.

The big lesson for the banks from today's decision by the British Bankers Association not to appeal against the high court ruling on Payment Protection Insurance is - funnily enough - very similar to the big lesson from the Great Crash of 2007-8.

In the case of PPI, much of what the banks have now acknowledged to be mis-selling seemed consistent with rules laid down by the regulator, the Financial Services Authority, in its handbook and its source book on the selling of insurance.

But the FSA argued that following the letter of these rules was a necessary but not sufficient guarantee that the banks were behaving property. The FSA argued that the big banks should have been more mindful of its over-arching principles, notably the imperative of paying due regard to the interests of customers and treating them fairly.

The banks appear to have been so seduced by the apparently huge profits available from insuring personal loans, mortgages and credit card debt that they pushed the insurance to all manner of unsuitable customers (the self-employed who could never make a claim for being made redundant, or those with pre-existing health conditions, that would invalidate claims, to name just two common examples).

"It is very difficult to justify how we behaved" said one senior banker. "You can't imagine supermarkets treating their customers in the way we treated ours. I know my colleagues think that so long as we followed what was in the FSA's handbook, we shouldn't be blamed. But my view is that we forgot the cardinal rule, which is that we're there to serve customers, not to shove something down their throats which they don't need".

This departure from the very basics of retailing is costing the banks very dearly indeed. Last week Lloyds - the market leader in PPI and the first of the big banks to say it would provide comprehensive restitution - said that the settlement would lead to a £3.2bn expense.

Today, Barclays has quantified the compensation and related costs at £1bn. There will be a similar charge for Royal Bank of Scotland. And HSBC has just said it is setting aside £274m to meet these costs.

In total for all the big banks, the costs are heading towards £6bn or so - and that's to ignore the compensation bill for hundreds of smaller firms which joined in the PPI mis-selling frenzy.

Now what's striking is that the PPI debacle shares strong cultural characteristics with the behaviour that took many of the world's banks to the brink of bankruptcy less than three years ago. During the boom years before the crisis of 2007-8, you won't need telling that banks lent and invested recklessly - to subprime borrowers, to commercial property, to each other, through off-balance sheet vehicles, in the form of "structured" products which delivered the illusion of quality (inter alia).

And much of this reckless lending and investing took advantage of the global Basel rules that give the official regulators' view of how much risk the banks were taking - and, as we now know, were catastrophically wrong.

But - many bankers belatedly concede - banks should have known better than to make their judgments on how to lend on the basis of the regulators' rules. They should have done what other commercial businesses do, which was to lend and invest on the basis of what would be sustainable and prudent for the long term.

Gaming or playing the Basel rules, and forgetting commercial common sense, led to disaster. It meant that Royal Bank of Scotland, in the autumn of 2008, looked like a sound bank as measured by the Basel rules, when to all intents and purposes it was bust.

Of course it is reasonable to blame the regulators for framing the rules badly. But many would say that the banks were more at fault for mindlessly running their businesses on the basis of what the rules allowed.

So what's the big lesson of both PPI and the 2007-8 crash? Well, it is probably that banks need to base everything they do on what is good for customers, shareholders and creditors in a fundamental sense - and not on what the rules allow them to do.

PS Apart from the banks, another group of firms - the claims management firms - look set to be burned by the banks' decision to chuck in the towel and pay compensation to 2.75m or so individuals who were mis-sold PPI insurance.

The banks will now set up operations to speedily process claims for compensation. So they would argue that there is no point in their customers using the services of claims management firms, because in doing so those customers would not gain any additional compensation but would have to pay commission to the claims handler.

My blog is dead. Long live the new blog. Or to put it another way, my page - and those of other BBC bloggers - is having a makeover. So if you don't want to read on, and you simply want to read my latest post, click here.

The reason for the change is to bring together more of my output in one place. So on the new page, you'll find many of my TV and radio pieces, and (soon) my tweets.

If I go mad and decide to do other social media, that'll be there too.

Fingers crossed that you like what you see. I can't hope that all of you will love all the changes. And in particular, I am sure some of you will be frustrated that (for cost reasons) there is now a 400 character limit on the comments you can leave.

Please don't let that put you off expressing yourselves. I can't tell you how much I value your opinions and the debate we have.

As for the posts I've written since Picks was launched in January 2007, the best place to find them is here. For future posts, the best URL for me is still bbc.co.uk/robertpeston

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