STORMY WEATHER : London's biggest financial institutions are struggling

WITH the exceptions of pop music and pornography, no industry has embraced globalisation as keenly as banks. And among financial centres, few locations have gone as wild for internationalisation as London. There, over the past few decades, institutions long focused on domestic markets, like Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), invested heavily in investment banking and expanded their operations abroad.

But Britain's big four international banks—which include HSBC and Standard Chartered alongside Barclays and RBS—are now in trouble again. Hit badly by the financial crisis and the regulatory backlash that followed, they nonetheless enjoyed renewed growth in profits as the global economy improved. Good times proved short-lived, however. Last week, Barclays announced that its full-year profits for 2014 declined 17%. RBS posted a loss of £3.5 billion ($5.4 billion). This week's news has got worse. On March 3rd Barclays revealed that its profits slid 21%. On March 4th Standard Chartered announced a 30% fall.