How can Barclays' business be OK if its fines might cost it another £1bn?
|
Version 0 of 1. Outlook Barclays wants to tell you that what is described in the City as its “underlying business” is doing just fine. For the first three months of the year, that business’s profits grew by a healthy 9 per cent, with the down-sized investment banking arm doing particularly well. The fly in the ointment, of course, was the nearly £1bn worth of provisions made against the cost of some of the bank’s bewildering array of regulatory issues. Some £150m will go towards the continually rising cost of payment protection insurance mis-selling, but the lion’s share – £800m in total – is slated to cover a settlement for the bank’s part in the City-wide conspiracy to rig foreign exchange rates. At least predominantly. The bank was coy about what that means in practice, merely referring people back to its annual report, which has a rather long list of bugbears in the notes to the accounts. That is why I have in the past questioned whether it is at all appropriate to focus on numbers “underlying” regulatory issues. There are so many, and they are such a recurring feature of banks’ results – because it isn’t just Barclays that plays this game – that they really should be assessed as an integral part of a banking operation. Revenues and profits from Barclays’ various businesses – from the sale of financial products to advising other companies on takeovers and mergers – go up and down from quarter to quarter. So do the costs incurred from having previously done some of that business in an unethical manner. We should also, really, consider the various banks’ strategies for dealing with these issues, just as we consider their mortgage pricing strategies, or their corporate lending or investment banking strategies. |