November 14, 2007 (LPAC) --The banking blood bath, or write-down, continues to spread through the world's largest banks:

**On November 14, Britain's largest bank and one of the ten largest in the world, the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC), took a $3.4 billion "impairment charge" on its third quarter report, which consisted of its subdivision, HSBC Finance, provisioning $3.4 billion for loan-loss reserves to cover losses from its deteriorating U.S. mortgage portfolio. HSBC had already announced in September, that it would shut down its Decision One Mortgage unit; on November 14, it announced it would close or consolidate 260 consumer-lending branches in the U.S., which is one-fifth of the HSBC's U.S. consumer -lending units (HSBC owns owns both Beneficial Finance and Household Finance lending companies). HSBC was compelled to take an immense $10.6 billion loss due to non-performing U.S. mortgages during 2006.

**During the third quarter, the effect of the ongoing collapse of the dollar-based world financial system, including the U.S. mortgage bubble, struck Japan's banking system hard. Mizuho Financial Group, one of Japan's Big Three banks, took a $630 million write-down, largely due to its exposure to U.S. Mortgage-Backed Securities. During the same quarter, Sumitomo Mitsui, another one of Japan's Big Three banks, reported a $288 million write-down.

**Fannie Mae, a giant in the secondary housing market, and the biggest source of money to the U.S. housing market, announced, November 11, that its third-quarter loss more than doubled to $1.39 billion. Fannie Mae stated that its loss arose as the housing crash caused a mark down in the value of Fannie Mae's risky derivatives contracts. Fannie Mae owns or guarantees $2.7trillion of U.S. mortgages; were Fannie Mae's situation to continue to implode, that, by itself, would disintegrate the $20 trillion U.S. housing bubble.

**A cavalcade of banks is lining up to announce write-downs for the fourth quarter, though normally such announcements would not come for two more months. On Nov. 13, Bank of America announced, for that quarter, that it would carry out write-downs of $3 billion; Bear Stearns announced it would write-down $1.2 billion; it is anticipated that Merrill Lynch will announce $3-4 billion, and Citigroup $10-11 billion in write-downs for the fourth quarter. However, all this constitutes only a fraction of the true losses that the banks are actually carrying on their books.