Senior executives of HBOS tried to blame the losses on the temporary closure of wholesale markets.
They were the means the banks used to finance lending before the wholesale markets seized up.
For many of the owners, traveling to distant wholesale markets to buy goods poses a challenge.
Council leaders have backed plans to move the Birmingham Wholesale Markets out of the city centre.
BBC: Birmingham Wholesale Markets: Council leaders back move
By their nature, banks borrow short (from depositors or the wholesale markets) and lend long.
The frailties of the Wall Street investment banks in particular, their exposure to wholesale markets for funding have become shockingly clear.
Other banks, notably in Spain, Iceland and Scandinavia, are even more dependent on the wholesale markets.
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The current wholesale markets sit on a 21-acre site and include horticultural, meat, fish and poultry markets.
BBC: Birmingham Wholesale Markets: Council leaders back move
That interest rate is much lower than it currently costs them to borrow on the wholesale markets.
That means greater emphasis on retail deposits, where liquidity concerns are less acute, rather than wholesale markets.
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Among the hustle and bustle at Birmingham Wholesale Markets, traders expressed fears over plans to close the complex.
They would borrow from the wholesale markets, lend, then bundle the mortgages into bonds and sell the bonds.
Recently the rules have changed, restricting the number of tourists allowed to view the auctions and the wholesale markets.
Others have diversified out of boring retail banking into the more glamorous wholesale markets (securities trading and the like).
And you can see how some of those consumer trends resonate in the retail and wholesale markets serving them.
With wholesale markets immature or non-existent in much of Europe, pricing remains open to manipulation and cross-subsidy to keep newcomers out.
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It blamed the increases on the extra cost of using the gas and electricity networks and rising costs in energy wholesale markets.
Indian banks rely on deposits, not fickle wholesale markets, to fund themselves.
Regulators might have prevented the bank from relying so much on wholesale markets, but a disastrous takeover could have wrecked it as well.
Authorities had banned sales of live pigeon and ducks starting the morning after discovering H7N9 in samples taken from pigeons at three wholesale markets.
This failed when the market in general took fright at the mortgages they were offering and stopped being willing to lend through those wholesale markets.
The bigger suppliers have an advantage because they generate their own power, selling most of it to consumers, with little of it going to wholesale markets.
The investment bank may also see a beefed-up brokerage as the best way (eventually) to strengthen its deposit-gathering operations and reduce its reliance on wholesale markets.
Stronger banks and cajas have also been able to borrow from the wholesale markets, even if only at high rates and, in some cases, using state guarantees.
In the short term, the banks themselves will be very glad of a flood of retail deposits: that will leave them less dependent on jittery wholesale markets.
They could also argue that retail deposits can be as flighty as the wholesale markets: just ask Northern Rock and IndyMac, both of which suffered rapid withdrawals.
We were repeatedly advised that liquidity in wholesale markets depended on lending quality: good loan books would continue to attract funding when bad loan books began to default.
Thanks, in part, to the situation in the eurozone, banks and other lenders are finding it more expensive to borrow on wholesale markets, even if the government is not.
Instead, from August 9th, liquidity has dried up across all wholesale markets, making no distinction between loans of different quality, for much longer than even the most extreme forecast.
Smaller companies also found buying on wholesale markets difficult, because they needed high levels of collateral in order to buy and there was not a diversity of products on offer.
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