Joining the ranks of banking's big losers

An accepted truism of the global banking crisis is that the big Canadian banks have done rather better than their global peers, avoiding the worst of the writedowns.

But that idea is becoming increasingly difficult to uphold as a few of the Canadian banks ratcheted up their losses in second-quarter results announced this week. Almost all the bank chiefs warned, too, about slowing capital markets and rising loan losses. The notion that Canada's banks are relatively unscathed is starting to look like misplaced optimism.