I'm Not Quite Convinced Yet

When we first started to get the write downs of dodgy assets from the banks I cheered. For until we all knew where the losses were and how much they were there was going to be no way out of this credit crunch thingie.

UBS led a rally in banking stocks around the world after the Swiss banking giant's $19bn (£9.6bn) sub-prime writedown was taken as a sign that the worst of the credit crunch may over.

So I cheer again at this news, as we are getting closer to the sort of finacial transparency we need for the interbank markets to open up again.

However, as a slight dampener on this good news: I'm not convinced that we've seen the end of it yet. No facts or hard figures to point to but just a feeling (and one from someone who I should point out was, for a brief period of time, one of the worst stockbrokers on the planet) that we're about half way through.

We've had perhaps $200 billion declared so far, my little guess (and I repeat, it is no more than that) is that there's about the same to go again.

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