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Time to ring the Bell on banking cash profit

Commonwealth Bank produced a fresh performance of the comedy that is the banking sector's self-assessment of its "cash profit" yesterday. The bank opted to omit an infamous bad debt expense from its profit measure.CBA confirmed it needed to make "an additional provision" following its belated settlement (along with a score of other banks) with the liquidators of the Bell Group over a loan "restructured" in January 1990.Legal argument over this loan has raged from 1996 until last year.The bank said this provision was reported as a non-cash item "due to its historic and one-off nature."

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