No, it didn't necessarily double in reality but over the course of one month they updated their number to reflect a much deeper loss. This remains the fear with banks around the world. The Wall Street cheerleaders like to say that we've seen the last of the losses and then this happens again and again and again. It has to stop and we need to see a predictable and stable quarter followed by another stable and predictable quarter. After that, repeat and repeat. It will take years for these institutions to bounce back and generate confidence from the market though they have no one to blame but themselves. Well, maybe also their friends in government who gave them what they wanted as well. Banksters strike again.
Lloyds Banking Group said its HBOS unit made a hefty loss last year due to bigger-than-expected bad loans, wiping nearly a third off the group's stock market value.Conservative accountants? I didn't know such accountants existed after Enron and the credit crisis. Go figure.
HBOS had a pretax loss of 8.5 billion pounds ($12.28 billion) for 2008, Lloyds said in a statement on Friday, driven by 7 billion pounds in bad corporate loans and a further 4 billion pounds in asset write-downs.
In November, HBOS had estimated its corporate impairments at just 3.3 billion pounds.
Lloyds Banking Group shares were down 29 percent at 64.8 pence, having earlier fallen as low as 54.9 pence.
"The market doesn't like the fact that in a period of a month the corporate losses (at HBOS) are twice what they had announced," said Mamoun Tazi, analyst at MF Global.
Lloyds said the big rise in bad loans and write downs was driven by falling asset values as markets continued to deteriorate.
It said the increase also reflected the application of Lloyds own "more conservative" accounting methods at HBOS since the two banks joined forces late last year.
