Bad Day For British Banks
The City is not a happy place today: The U.K.'s two biggest banks both reported lower earnings thanks to the credit crisis, while Lloyds Banking Group announced a new round of job cuts.
First, Barclays and HSBC. The former said its third-quarter profit fell by half. Worse, its profit was actually lower than its write-downs and impairment charges, which doubled to £1.4 billion.
The latter was a little bit more coy, but the news was worse. HSBC said its third-quarter performance was lower than a year earlier, but didn't specify. It did say it took a US$3.5 billion hit on its own debt; without it, the bank would be doing better than it did in the third quarter last year. But it isn't.
And those are the strong banks. Lloyds, which last week took another government handout to stay afloat, announced that it would can 5,000 more people to save money. Slightly more than half of the layoffs will come from the bank's permanent workforce, the others being kicked to the curb are temps.
Most of the cuts are in Lloyds group operations department, with its insurance and retail mortgage businesses losing about 1,000 employees apiece.
Souring Loans Hit U.K. Bank Results [WSJ]
Lloyds to cut another 5,000 jobs [MarketWatch]