Its purchase in 1999 of Bankers Trust, an American wholesale bank, has proved successful, but it is not enough.
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The wholesale bank will continue to bleed into Abbey's results for some time.
Blame, though, lies mostly with Ian Harley, the former chief executive, who failed to keep tabs on what Gareth Jones was getting up to in the wholesale bank.
For example, buying by some of the big 15 investors is thought to have caused the spectacular rise in the price of shares in Alternatifbank, a profitable wholesale bank.
This will be a new private-sector investment bank (though, presumably for PR reasons, officials prefer to call it a "wholesale bank"), in which the government will have a stake of around a third.
Mr Taylor found this hard: he lacked a power base to force through tough decisions even if he had wanted to, and so preferred to tackle big, strategic questions, such as what to do with the wholesale bank and its investment-banking arm.
Everything from wholesale lists of bank details to DIY laptop-invading malware kits can now be bought online.
True, included in that list of 50 are some major global banks who are unlikely to have much trouble borrowing on the wholesale market: Deutsche Bank, for example, and JP Morgan.
We've seen many banks cut back on what they call wholesale lending, meaning the bank is funding mortgages that mortgage brokers are actually taking the paperwork for.
Over the past few months, India's consumer inflation has bucked a downtrend in wholesale inflation, constraining the central bank from lowering interest rates aggressively despite facing mounting pressure to make corporate borrowings cheaper and help stimulate an economy growing at its weakest pace in a decade.
Perhaps more importantly, borrowing that much on wholesale markets is neither a stable or prudent way to fund any bank - as the UK taxpayers found out to their cost when Northern Rock, Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS all went to the brink of collapse after their access to wholesale funds dried up in 2007-8.
Regulators might have prevented the bank from relying so much on wholesale markets, but a disastrous takeover could have wrecked it as well.
Worries about how HBOS, a British bank, would roll over its wholesale obligations forced it into the arms of Lloyds TSB on September 17th.
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Economic Affairs Secretary Arvind Mayaram said the government believes the economic slowdown is bottoming out and that easing wholesale inflation does provide room for the central bank to cut interest rates.
"Neither the cost nor the availability of wholesale funds has improved for lenders since the Bank of England launched its special liquidity scheme, helpful though that scheme is, " said CML director general Michael Coogan.
Supervisors on both sides of the Atlantic concluded that the bank's heavy reliance on wholesale markets (very short-term loans from companies and other banks) left it especially vulnerable to running out of money when confidence collapsed.
The bank admits compliance problems but denies any wholesale fraud by the institution.
The bank said loan-impairment levels in wholesale banking were "very low, " but that it is keeping a close eye on India and the Middle East for potential problems.
But rather like Northern Rock, the British bank that became too dependent on the wholesale markets for funding and collapsed in 2007, countries such as Greece and Italy have discovered that investors can suddenly withdraw their favours.
The Icelandic government has taken a 75% stake in Glitnir, a bank with outrageous reliance on gummed-up wholesale funding markets.
The bank has further reduced its dependence on unreliable wholesale funding.
However, during the hearing on Wednesday he said the main reason for the bank's demise was the "unforeseen closure of the wholesale funding markets, which caused us to run out of liquidity".
The answer is that when it comes to retail and wholesale borrowing rates, the lesson of the past few years is that the Bank of England is only one piece of the puzzle, and a smaller one that it was a few years ago.
"It is clear that, with the benefit of hindsight, the bank did become exposed to excessive levels of risk, particularly in the wholesale markets and the corporate division, " Lord Stevenson wrote ahead of the hearing.
The bank got itself into difficulty as it borrowed most of its funds from the global wholesale money markets.
Bank of America has been cutting down on its Home Loans business with the recent decision to exit the wholesale lending and reverse mortgage businesses as well as the decision to sell Balboa Insurance.
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