I cannot explain how much I love that headline, and how hard I’m going to work to make it relevant. So the stress test results [.pdf] came out yesterday, and revealed that, while none of the banks are currently considered insolvent, several of them could go that way if the government’s “more adverse” scenario of unemployment hitting 10.3% comes to pass. So they’re asking 11 bank-holding companies to raise capital to meet their preferred “cushion” level. Here’s the summary of who needs what, in billions, as per the Wall Street Journal’s colorful front page:
Wells Fargo: $13.7
Citigroup: $5.5
GMAC: $11.5
Regions Financial: $2.5
SunTrust: $2.2
KeyCorp: $1.8
Fifth Third: $1.1
PNC Financia: $l .6
Morgan Stanley: $1.8
J.P. Morgan Chase, BB&T, Capital One, US Bancorp, MetLife, Goldman Sachs, Bank of NY Mellon, American Express, and State Street: $0
Having six months to raise new, private capital: Priceless.
Let me highlight the surprises:
- Wells Fargo needs quite a bit of funding to be adequately cushioned against any further decline in the economy. The predictions for Wells are already being called overly optimistic by some, because Wells — like several of the passing institutions — is heavily invested in real estate that may go further south than the government’s prediction.
- Capital One is not on the needy list — let’s hope credit card defaults don’t surpass the government’s more adverse scenario numbers (18-20% losses).
- The Citi number seems low — until you realize that they need to raise $5.5 billion IN ADDITION to the $45 billion from the government that they just converted to common stock and the $3.4 billion it just sold Nikko for. So put them down for $50 billion and change.
- GMAC suuuuucks. I’ve got another post on that one coming later, though.
So, what do you do, the day after the government tells everyone that you aren’t sufficiently capitalized to survive a 1.4 percent rise in unemployment? If you’re Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley, well, you use that encouraging news to raise $7.5 billion each today:
In the capital-raising exercises, Wells Fargo sold $7.5 billion of common stock; regulators had ruled it needs to fill a capital hole of $13.7 billion.
Here’s my question — who bought those public offerings? Friends of Bernie Madoff? The Morgan Stanley results show that 45% of their expected loan losses are in Commercial Real Estate Loans, a category in which we aren’t even close to the bottom of the market — but their overall. They did, however, manage to raise $6.5 billion last quarter, and their overall exposure to bad parts of the market is much slimmer than most.
But how bad did people think this was going to be that the news that Wells Fargo’s adverse-case-scenario losses will be $89.6 billion made Wall Street happy? Shares were up 3.4 today (13.8 percent) on the news. What?
I’m glad that there’s private capital to be found to shore up these banks, because it does mean that less government money will be needed. But the sheer, amazing balls of these guys, to use a report of “it’s not as bad as we thought!” to raise billions of dollars — it certainly reminds us that nothing’s really changed on Wall Street in terms of risky behavior.