As it turned out, the write-downs disclosed by many financial institutions went far beyond the expectations of late last year. The chart on the left of slide 5 shows that although major euro area banking groups did report large write-downs, these were significantly smaller than the income losses disclosed by their European peers from outside the euro area and by large US banking groups.
After the disclosure of full-year 2007 financial statements, more write-downs were expected to be revealed over the following few quarters, and these expectations were broadly confirmed by the financial results for the first quarter of 2008.