Lunchtime Links: Did HSBC actually make a very large loss in its investment bank last quarter?

Today is the day of HSBC's third quarter results. Profits in global banking and markets are down 53% in the third quarter and the bank is saying the usual things about "turbulent markets" and "further downside risk."

So far, so bad. But are HSBC's Global Banking and Markets (GBM) results actually a lot, lot worse than they seem? The bank doesn't break out the amount it made on accounting gains on own credit for the investment bank, but across the bank as a whole these totaled $4.1bn for the third quarter, up from $934m in the third quarter last year.

HSBC's profits in global banking and markets were only $1bn last quarter and these included the changing value of its own debt. With debt valuation adjustments (DVA) at $4.1bn across the bank as a whole, it doesn't take a genius to see that those profits may well be apocryphal and attributable to little more than accounting convention. Without that, GBM may in fact have made a large loss.

This being the case, the 1.6bn that HSBC says is the additional cost of being located in London is looking more and more like an unaffordable luxury. This is especially so in view of the fact that while European investment banking activities suffered last quarter, other regions did well: HSBC said GBM revenues rose strongly in Asia and Latin America and that FX revenues were strong in Asia and the Americas as a whole.

So far, HSBC said it has made a mere 5,000 of its planned 30,000 redundancies.

In other news:

George Osborne has condemned plans for a European Union levy on financial transactions as a "big tax on pensioners" that will lead to 995,000 job losses and not cost bankers a penny. (Telegraph)

What George Osborne actually said. (Telegraph)

Mervyn King started shouting and developed shaking hands when he discovered the extent to which Michel Barnier proposed to curtail his powers to set banks' capital rules. (Financial Times)

Lazard has recruited a senior debt financing banker from Rothschild. (Financial News)

RBS has launched major cuts in its fixed income department that could slash that division's workforce by 30% to 35%. (Fox Business)

It is clear from the outside that people weren't doing what Horta-Osorio told them to. (Telegraph)

22 year old German wins $8.72 million playing poker. (Daily Mail)

Michael Lewis: The human mind is so wedded to stereotypes and so distracted by vivid descriptions that it will seize upon them, even when they defy logic, rather than upon truly relevant facts. (Vanity Fair)

Goldman Sachs traders recorded losses from that business on 21 days in the third quarter, the most since the fourth quarter of 2008. (Bloomberg)

Corzine, these people say, is worth far closer to $1 million than he is to $1 billion. (Fox Business)

The middle class was decimated in the industrial revolution too. (Rick Bookstaber)