Bad credit mars Wall St. bankers' summer break

AFP, July, 2008

WASHINGTON (AFP) — July is usually a quieter month for busy Wall Street bankers, spent lounging poolside at the Hamptons or on a Caribbean beach, but a nagging credit crunch has cast a dark cloud over such vacations.

Major US banks, including Citigroup, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Merrill Lynch, are due to unveil their second quarter earnings in coming weeks, and analysts say some results will not be pretty.

America's finance houses are weathering one of the worst market downturns in decades as a two-year long housing market slump and a credit squeeze, which erupted last summer, continue to roil balance sheets.

Some bankers believed at the start of the year that Wall Street would ride out the credit storm by the summer, but such predictions have proved premature.

Lehman Brothers announced a net loss of 2.8 billion dollars for its fiscal second quarter on June ...