Scotiabank will take a $595-million hit to the bottom line due to the turmoil in the financial markets including the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, Scotiabank announced Tuesday.

"Both the equity and fixed-income markets have experienced significant declines in value and extreme levels of volatility over the last several weeks, exacerbated by the Lehman bankruptcy," said Rick Waugh, Scotiabank president and chief executive.

The charges include $115 million in trading revenues related to the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers — a Wall Street investment bank — and $370 million in adjustments to the value of securities it holds.

The bank said it will also take a $110-million after-tax charge related to derivatives. The bank said it expects to reverse the charge over the average three-year life of the hedges so no loss should occur.

Scotiabank expects to release its fourth-quarter results on Dec. 2.

In terms of the bank's operations, approximately $305 million of the charges in its fiscal fourth quarter relates to Scotia Capital, $90 million to international banking and $200 million to the other business segment, which includes group treasury and executive offices.

'More transparency in today's world is good': analyst

Despite the size of the charge, Blackmont Capital analyst Brad Smith thought the bank made the right decision and was not concerned.

In particular, he said it was good that Scotiabank disclosed its writedown on credit default obligations which, together with available-for-sale securities, accounted for $370 million of adjustments.

"They could have avoided some of that CDO loss by recharacterizing those investments, but they chose not to. More transparency in today's world is good.

"Banks can elect to one of two things, they can look at 2008 as basically a lost year and put everything that they know of through and hope for a better 2009 — and that's what Scotia is doing — or they can pretend in some respects that some of the losses they are sitting on aren't there."

Smith noted that the one-time charges announced Tuesday did nothing to threaten the Scotiabank's current dividend rate.

"We are on the record that Canadian bank dividend growth will continue to decline until it hits zero, but we don't anticipate negative growth or a dividend cut," Smith said.

Scotiabank's announcement follows a similar hit taken by Manulife in its third quarter.

Last month, Manulife said it expects to take a $250-million hit on its third-quarter earnings because of credit losses linked to the worldwide financial crisis.

The Manulife charge included $50 million from an increase in its reserves for losses as a result of credit downgrades on bonds and other investments it holds.

Shares in Scotiabank, which announced the one-time charges after the close of markets, finished up $1.07 at $37.17 on the Toronto Stock Exchange on Tuesday.