by Calculated Risk on 10/15/2007 11:09:00 AM

From the WSJ: Nomura to Close U.S. Mortgage Business

Nomura said it would take a loss of $621 million on write-downs of residential mortgages and an additional charge of about $85 million for restructuring the business. That will swing Nomura to a pretax loss of as much as $510 million in the quarter ended Sept. 30, 2007. In the same quarter a year earlier, Nomura posted a net profit of about $2.1 billion.

"This is an extremely regrettable result," said Nobuyuki Koga, Nomura's president and chief executive officer.

It appears Nomura wrote down more than they made from the mortgage business in earlier periods:

... the $620 million Nomura has written off on subprime loans dwarfs the estimated $108 million in revenue it generated on residential mortgage-bond underwriting between 2002 and 2006, according to Dealogic.

Regrettable indeed.