Barclays Second-Half Profit Falls 21% on Writedowns (

[SoCalDem]

These financial "giants" need to open up their books and take the BIG HIT..all at once.. They have been dribbling this out for months now..

I KNOW that THEY know how much they have lost.. If they don't, do we really want to "trust" them with any MORE of our money??

TELL ALL.. and take your lumps..




http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aTD9PIxq.35U&refer=home

Barclays Second-Half Profit Falls 21% on Writedowns (Update1)

By Ben Livesey and Jon Menon

Feb. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Barclays Plc, the U.K.'s third- biggest bank, said second-half profit fell 21 percent on asset writedowns and a slump in revenue from fixed-income trading.

Net income declined to 1.78 billion pounds ($3.48 billion), or 26.6 pence a share, beating analysts' estimates, the bank said in a statement today. The company fell as much as 4.5 percent in London trading after the Barclays Capital securities unit posted 1.6 billion pounds in net writedowns related to assets such as collateralized debt obligations and loans for leveraged buyouts. U.S. and European banks face rising bad consumer loans as borrowers come under pressure from more expensive home-loan payments and a slowing housing market. The U.S. subprime- mortgage slump forced the world's biggest financial institutions to write down more than $145 billion and prompted Zurich-based Credit Suisse Group to say today that pricing errors on bonds will cut first-quarter profit by about $1 billion.

``The fact that there are no surprises is good news and shows that Barclays is coming out of this with minimum injuries and bodes well for the future,'' said MF Global Securities Ltd. analyst Mamoun Tazi in London, who rates the stock ``buy.'' Barclays, led by Chief Executive Officer John Varley, raised its dividend by 10 percent to 22.5 pence in the second half as profit beat the 1.73 billion-pound median estimate of 13 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. It earned 2.26 billion pounds, or 34.5 pence, in the second half of 2006.

`Tough Market Conditions'

Pretax profit fell 14 percent to 2.96 billion pounds, declining 30 percent to 675 million pounds at Barclays Capital, the most profitable division in the first six months of 2007. Profit from U.K. banking was little changed at 1.29 billion pounds and more than doubled at Barclaycard to 268 million pounds. Barclays was down 2.6 percent at 448 pence as of 8:30 a.m. in London. It slipped 28 percent in the six months through yesterday, just below a 27 percent drop in the FTSE All-Share Banks Index.

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[salin]

1. I would guess that the really *don't* know... because

many have been involved in backing 'leveraged' debt of all sorts of kinds of debt (ala enron fancy schmancy special vehicle type schemes) I would guess they do not yet know which chickens are going to come home to roost.