It's hell out there

摘要

Conditions are as awful as any since the second world war, said Albrecht Schmidt, head of HypoVereinsbank (HVB), Germany's second biggest bank. The most striking feature of this month's earnings announcements from European banks is that bad debt provisions-the amount of money that they set aside to cover the dud loans that they may have to write off―have soared. Allianz, the German insurer, issued a profits warning because of high levels of bad loans at its subsidiary, Dresdner Bank, and Deutsche Bank charged EUD511m ($469m) for bad debts against its profits, twice last year's figure. Bad debt provisions in the first half of the year at Britain's Barclays Bank rose by 43% and at BNP Pari-bas's French retail division by 55%.