Word: northerner
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...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 said Monday, the first six months...
...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...
...Labor Day to help eliminate a budget gap of $26 billion. While the Department of Parks and Recreation isn't releasing a list of potential sites on the chopping block, the stairway-to-heaven park likely is at risk because it has some of the lowest attendance figures in Northern California...
...more countries, fueled by the alluring imagery of devil-may-care outlaws making their own rules. Pop culture helped buttress that iconic image, especially the 1954 Marlon Brando film The Wild One and Hunter S. Thompson's 1966 account of spending a year with the gang in northern California. The group says a typical member rides 20,000 miles a year, usually on the Angels' preferred machines, Harley-Davidsons. And members still refer to themselves as "one percenters" - a half-century-old boast playing off the saying that 1% of troublemakers give a bad name to 99% of respectable bikers...