Everyone’s wearing brown trousers over at financial giant Lehman Brothers where a drying up of work saw shares fall 76% last week - £2.2bn to you and me. All the greater the doff of the bowler hat then to our own Co-operative Bank. They have seen profits up on last year, growth in their 5.5million customer base, and significantly cut their “bad debts” (the cheap mortgage lending that got the markets into this mess to begin with). The bank has always capitalised on its ethical credentials, which has made it stand out, but the big boss David Anderson says the happy days at Co-op are also down to thinking outside the box: in-store banking at their supermarkets; and the creation of a Co-op master brand to allow it to trade across all its businesses. We ran into them at the Sheffield Uni fairs this year, and they’re worth talking to if you see them doing the rounds at the Career Fairs this autumn.

The headline grabbing ninnies who claimed that the City could see as many as 20,000 jobs go in the name of the credit crunch have put on their “I told you so” T-shirts this morning as 1,200 jobs are hanging by a thread at the London HQ of German investment bank Dresdner Klienwort. But is this really a credit crunch catastrophe? The fact is that another German giant, Commerzbank is on the brink of a takeover of DK – and the two banks have been Germanically proficient in telling the world that as many as 9000 staff posts from the current 67,000 may be made redundant. Its business, not recession: the investment banking arm of DK has been losing money for four quarters in a row so it’s understandable that a shake up is in order – well, something’s not working. As in most mergers, it’s the support staff that get hit, where it doesn’t make sense to double up certain roles – in this case, IT workers are expected to take an early bath. Don’t write off Commerzbank or the private banking side of DK – Kleinwort Benson (already ranked in the top 10 UK banks) – mergers mean scale, and scale often means security.

Some kind of good news at last: our old pals at LV or  Liverpool Victoria insurance to you and me, are to pay £150m to swallow the Highway Insurance Group. The move is hoped to make the green hearted scallies a “top five insurer” by 2012. So, more customers, bigger resources, more security, broader opportunities. Not many are shouting about that right now.

Three credit crunch jousting knights now: Insurer Amlin’s profits beat expectations at with £137m to play with. They’re slightly incoherent in our new advice video. Burger King made $51 in the last three months – that’s a jump of over 5% - as more of us look for cheap, quick “food”. McDonald’s too has had booming profits. And Cineworld has declared itself “recession proof” with nearly £15m profits thanks to Batman and Mamma Mia showing at its 74 locations – and a 6% rise in ticket prices. The next Bond film, Quantum of Solace (?!) is expected to shatter records in October.

BA is to merge with Spanish airline, Iberia, creating a new giant European airline of 450 aircraft for 65 million annual passengers in the £3.95bn deal. There’s talk that Air France-KLM or Germany’s Lufthansa might launch a counter-offer for Spain’s flag carrier. Air France-KLM is the the world’s leading airline by revenues. It was formed by the combination of France and the Netherlands’ national carriers under the ownership of a holding company led by a unified management team – the new BA Iberia deal is expected to follow the same structure. That means both airlines would retain their brands (so no need for BA staff to train on how to sleep in or have sex with tourists or for Iberia staff to have their teeth unstraightend). The two would also cooperate on fares and routes, with BA providing a dominant position on north Atlantic routes and Iberia on the lucrative Spain-to-Latin America market. BA insisted the move was not in response to the terrbiel market for airlines at present, but the head of BA Sales did confirm that the airline’s most profitable customers – BA’s most profitable segment – are cutting back on travel.