Bankers are counting the cost of the crisis. After almost two months spent weathering the storm in the global debt markets, the world’s leading investment banks are adding up the damage to their balance sheets from the sudden jump in the cost of risky credit and the liquidity drought that has left them holding billions of dollars in unwanted assets.

The numbers are large: this week alone, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and UBS have announced asset writedowns of almost $13bn (£6.4bn, €9.2bn) between them for the third quarter of the year. This comes on top of losses already disclosed by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. Merrill Lynch and JPMorgan Chase have yet to outline their own exposures but are also expected to have suffered setbacks.