We imagine that when we borrow money or owe money and fail to pay, we become a bad debt.

But when we see a bank making a profit of $10.64 billion, whilst boasting $3.28 billion of bad debts, we can be puzzled.

When the top brass of that bank tells us, that they are in the business of making money and only made $10.64 billion instead of $13.92 billion, we then understand, that a bad debt to a bank, is a failed fraud.

Banks have a monopoly business of issuing new money as credit.

This is a very lucrative business of making money out of nothing. Even if the fraud doesn't work, because the credit does not turn into money, a lot of money is still made. Someone accepts credit as a loan of money and then does not redeem the loan. The bank calls it a bad debt, even if the interest paid on the credit is an amount greater than what is owed.

When we realise how much money the banks spend on seducing us into debt, we can understand what the banks mean, when it gets a bit difficult to seduce us, as fast as they desire.

They then say that the economy is in a decline, that interest rates are too high, that recruitment of useless and destructive bureaucrats has cooled off a bit, that home seekers are outbidding each other with cheap money, with a little less frenzy and Douglas Flint of HSBC warns his shareholders that the rat race might slow a little, the runners getting weak, and difficulties lie ahead.

To HSBC bad debts are the debts they failed to establish. The loss of a few billion from a failure to redeem some of those loans, is dismissed as mere "upstick".

The hard graft of the Credit Trade creates a rising tide of prosperity for all banks. They are urged to unite in measures to set their frauds in solid gold.