CREDIT CRASH

Nothing surprising here, plenty more losses to come for financials.

Ambac covers $556bn in municipal and asset-backed securities, hardly anyone stepped up to the plate.Now trading down 19 per cent

I always check credit ratings before I make a decision

This won't tackle the lack of deals or reluctance of lenders to refinance those "tricky customers" who need to re mortgage soon

At least Bernanke was clear about what they believed - even if they're wrong.

Fed sees more risk to the downside BUT doesn't realize that there's enough decoupling already in the system so that commodity prices etc will continue to rise. Add to that further upward pressures due to biofuel and core cpi will rise no matter how deep a recession we're in.

Writedowns are MORE than $18 billion. In the release they reveal U.S. consumer credit costs increased $4.1 billion. This is in addition to the Write-downs on sub-prime related exposures. Really the loss is around $22 billion which is close to worst case that was expected

Its a sensible move since Merrill need to get something onto the balance sheet, especially as Q4 subprime bad news approaches.For GE's part they just get the decent units.

@crikey Nobody wants your parcels @jaydasree OK so no pies for me and Goldman didn't lose money BUT Chammah and Gorman do very nicely thank you seeing as Morgan Stanley ONLY lost $9.4 billion. call me bitter

wellspun lets play pass the parcel

Wellspuns jealous, no bonus = no pies for you next year. Blankfein was rewarded for a job well done. Goldman posted record results while everyone else got burnt.

So when is it gonna end then?

But they promised we'd make lots of money!

yep borrowers do have responsibility but the point is that many worthless CDO's consist of predatory subprime mortgages,aggressively sold to consumers who didn't know better.Ever heard of borrowers being told what to put on their application? Some of those subprime mortgages were made to people that don't even exist!

Dont see how they were all owned by the "elites", anyway dont borrowers have some sort of responsibility in all this too?

Don't worry still plenty more costs to be "exposed", fallout is only just starting and TFA doesn't even mention inflation