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: The credit crunch has been an alien landscape for many banks. Exotic products, new accounting rules and an unprecedented liquidity freeze have left them groping for handholds. The terrain is gradually changing, as attention switches away from falls in the market value of securities and towards actual credit losses. Citigroup expects to see lower write-downs, but higher credit losses, when it announces its second-quarter results this month.

Industry-watchers see some relief in this. “We will all feel more like we are in our comfort zones after a six-month period of firefighting on structured-credit blow-ups,” analysts at Merrill Lynch sighed in a recent note. Not so fast. In Britain and America, the countries with the biggest headaches, the credit downturn has plenty of unfamiliar features.

The scale of the boom that came before it is the most obvious one. Anglo-Saxon consumers are famously carrying record amounts of debt. Exposure to commercial property has also reached disturbing proportions at many banks. The picture is grimmer in America, where concerns about unemployment are greater and consumer confidence is badly dented, but the economic environment is worsening fast in Britain too. “People have to start rebuilding their own balance-sheets,” says Adrian Cattley, an analyst at Citigroup.

Banks are also dealing with new types of borrowing. In Britain untested areas of specialist lending, such as buy-to-let and self-certification mortgages, are coming under stress for the first time. HBOS, the country’s biggest lender, revealed in June that arrears in these asset classes had risen much faster during the first five months of the year than among prime borrowers.

In America worries are focused on home-equity lending, an asset class with more than $1 trillion of outstanding balances. As homeowners fall into negative equity, these loans are the first to suffer, turning from secured to unsecured borrowing. Unlike subprime mortgages, which were sold on to other unfortunates, banks tended to keep home-equity loans on their books. And to get at the collateral, they have to buy out the lenders of the primary mortgage first, an expensive and risky process. Write-offs on home-equity loans are either zero or 100%, says Michael Zeltkevic of Oliver Wyman, a consultancy.

In theory, none of this should change the map that bankers usually follow when the credit cycle turns: tighten lending criteria, make provision for losses and try to stop struggling borrowers from defaulting. In practice, things are now much more finely balanced.