Crew Capital Management Thoughts on Investment

Welcome to the Crew Capital Management Thoughts on Investment blog. At Crew Capital, investment education is key to how we work with our clients. We hope our conversation and analysis entice you to think further on your investment strategies and planning. For further discussion, please contact us at rjung@crewcapital.com

Thank you!
Robert F. Jung, CFA CPA*

*CPA inactve

Thursday, October 2, 2008

Bank Failures Expected to Increase

Bank failures exploded with the real estate bust and S&L crisis of the 80’s and early 90’s. In the current environment, we are not predicting anything on that scale in terms of the number of failures to come. First of all, there are thousands fewer commercial banks today after years of M&A. Also, banks generally hold more capital against their assets. So bank failures have become very rare – and or several quarters, from 2004 through late 2006, there were no bank failures at all in the U.S. But smaller banks are very exposed to consumer loans and tend to hold mortgages on their books (versus securitizing them). While they often are more conservative underwriters than the big banks, they are still staring at major losses. Also, smaller banks tend to focus on lending to local real-estate builders and developers, another shaky industry in which the big banks are experiencing rapidly deteriorating credit quality. When we first ran this piece in June, there had been 3 failures in 2008. Currently, that number stands at 13.


source: Argus Research, Market Watch, October 2, 2008

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