Word: hbos
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European bank stocks continued to take a beating on Tuesday following a series of ad hoc steps by national governments to try to shore up confidence in financial institutions. By the day's close, Britain's troubled HBOS was down 41.5%, and the Royal Bank of Scotland's shares had lost 39% of their value; Germany's Commerzbank fell 14%, and Deutsche Bank was down 8.9%. The pummeling followed a black Monday in which stock exchanges across Europe dropped as much as 9%, suggesting that the markets were casting a doleful eye on the $700 billion U.S. bailout package passed...
...naked short selling, the aggressive practice of betting on a stock's fall without first borrowing shares. But that did nothing to quell widespread speculation about which struggling financial institution would be the next to disappear. British bank Lloyds was in talks to buy beleaguered U.K. mortgage lender HBOS. Washington Mutual, the U.S.'s largest thrift, put itself up for auction, and Wells Fargo and Citigroup might be interested, according to reports. Morgan Stanley appeared to be on the table too. There were murmurs the investment bank was holding conversations with Charlotte-based bank Wachovia. Chinese conglomerate Citic Group, owner...
Amid the tide of red ink flowing from many of the world's largest banks these days, big profits seem out of fashion. On Tuesday alone, Deutsche Bank announced its first quarterly loss in five years, while HBOS, the U.K.'s biggest mortgage lender, said it would replenish its depleted coffers with an $8 billion share sale. Both firms announced billions of dollars of fresh write-downs...
...Further fallout from the squeeze on credit could yet follow in the U.K. Northern Rock's rivals Alliance and Leicester and HBoS similarly rely on liquid credit markets, albeit to a degree that's "smaller in magnitude," Collins Stewart's Potter wrote in a research note Friday. But the anxiety's not limited to Britain. Spooked investors dumped shares in Spanish, French and German banks Monday. Northern Rock, in other words, may not be the last financial institution to find itself in a hard place...
...another potential outcome. "Who would be doing it?" asks Justin Urquhart Stewart at Seven Investment Management in London: "Anyone wishing to buy that asset book at discounted value." And further fallout from the squeeze on credit could yet follow in the U.K. Northern Rock rivals Alliance and Leicester and HBoS similarly rely on liquid credit markets, albeit to a degree that's "smaller in magnitude," Collins Stewart's Potter wrote in a research note. Northern Rock, in other words, may not be the last financial institution to find itself in a hard place...