But wait just a second. I thought the Wall Street cheerleaders were telling us the worst was behind us? Could they have been wrong? Oh the horror!
Royal Bank of Scotland has suffered the biggest loss in British corporate history and revealed that it would need to sell up to £19.5bn new shares to the taxpayer to insure £300bn of its most troublesome assets.
The scale of the losses suffered by the part-nationalised bank exacerbated the row about a £650,000 pension being drawn by former chief executive Sir Fred Goodwin, who is 50 and left last month after almost a decade at the helm.
Treasury minister Stephen Timms said the current RBS board was "extremely concerned" by the pension deal, which threatens to undermine government claims that it would not reward failure.
The figures from RBS today showed a statutory loss of £40bn, which falls to £24.1bn if technical issues relating to the bank's acquisition of ABN Amro are ignored. It largely comprises £7.8bn of trading losses and £16.8bn of writedowns caused by paying too much for acquisitions, notably ABN.
The City had been braced for £20bn of writedowns so the overall loss is slightly lower than expected.
But Derek Simpson, joint leader of Unite, said: "These historic and humiliating losses bring into sharp focus just how reckless RBS's former management team have behaved.
"The whole country is paying the price through job cuts and repossessions on a massive scale. It is time to take control and fully nationalise this bank.
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