Word: bankes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...measure of the havoc wreaked on the world's banking system in recent months that the words chosen by bank bosses to convey the health of their business have lost all relative meaning. Victor Blank, chairman of Lloyds Banking Group, saw "exciting prospects for the group" in its first-half results unveiled Wednesday, Aug. 5. Northern Rock "is making progress," chief executive Gary Hoffman said of the British bank's half-year results announced a day earlier. "Our first-half performance," Barclays boss John Varley reckoned the day before that, was "a good start." At HSBC, chief exec Michael Geoghegan...
...other words, improvement means different things to different bank bosses. Mounting bad debt at Lloyds drove it to a $6.8 billion loss in the first half of this year, some distance from the $4.8 billion profit recorded in the same six months of 2008. Northern Rock, nationalized early last year after a run on its deposits in 2007, slumped to a pretax loss of $1.2 billion in the first half, far worse than the $984 million shortfall recorded in the same period of 2008. A stellar six months at the investment-banking unit of London-based HSBC, meanwhile, helped prop...
...course, as institutions emerging from the worst of the credit crisis, the banks have little more than that in common. Famous for flogging mortgages worth 125% of a property's value, Newcastle-based Northern Rock was caught with its pants down when the wholesale markets it relied on to fund those loans froze in 2007. With unemployment rising and house prices still on the wane, the bank's impairment charges for soured loans tripled, to $1 billion in the first half of this year vs. the same period in 2008. Just as worrying: a shade under 4% of its home...
...shadow of Hamas looms large over the conference, and not only because the movement is blocking Fatah delegates in Gaza from traveling to Bethlehem until Abbas agrees to release some 1,000 Hamas prisoners being held in the West Bank. Hamas, quite simply, has eclipsed Fatah in leading the Palestinian fight against Israel. It directly controls Gaza, and only the ongoing suppression of free political activity in the West Bank prevents the Islamists from making a far stronger challenge to Abbas on his own turf. The steady stream of Western officials and journalists traveling to Damascus to meet with Hamas...
Watch TIME's video "Protesting Gaza, Carefully, in the West Bank...