Good Monday morning to you all. Here’s a quick roundup of the headlines that are capturing my attention at this time
…
* HSBC set aside $3.2
billion to cover bad U.S. loans. That sounds awful, but it’s actually below the $4.2 billion to $4.8 billion that
analysts polled by Bloomberg were expecting. HSBC got into subprime mortgage lending in a big way when it acquired
Household International back in 2003.
* Bond insurance firm MBIA announced a Q1 net loss of $2.4 billion, which compares to a profit of
$198.6 million in the year-earlier period. The biggest hit came from a $3.6 billion, unrealized pre-tax loss on
credit derivatives.
* IndyMac Bancorp, a leading Alt-A mortgage lender during the boom times, said it lost $184 million in the first quarter. That compared
with a profit of $52.4 million in the same quarter a year earlier. The company is deferring interest payments on some
securities and suspending dividend payments on others. It has boosted its credit reserves to $2.7 billion (from $813 million a year prior), and shifted to a GSE/FHA/VA
lending model (88% of its production in the latest quarter fell into that category)
* Late Friday, we learned that another bank failed. ANB Financial of Bentonville, Arkansas was closed by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Pulaski Bank and Trust Company assumed its deposits. ANB had roughly $2.1 billion in
assets at the time of the closure. Some details on why the bank failed, and how its failure compares size-wise to other
failures, are included in this AP story excerpt:
“It was the third closure this year of an FDIC-insured bank. Douglass National Bank, a Missouri bank with $58.5 million
in assets, was shut in January; another Missouri institution with assets of $18.7 million, Hume Bank, was shut down in
March.
“Both were dwarfed in size of ANB Financial, where regulators found lax lending standards, mostly for construction and
development loans for projects in Utah, Idaho and Wyoming, as well as Arkansas.”
Related posts:
- ABA: Record loan delinquencies in Q1 The American Bankers Association just released its latest look at quarterly delinquencies for a wide variety of consumer credit...
- MBA: Q2 delinquency and foreclosure rates rise again The Mortgage Bankers Association released data on second quarter mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures this morning. Here’s what we learned: *...
- Yet another credit fire flares up, this time … Just when Congress and Treasury (to say nothing of the SEC, FDIC, and so on) manage to put out one...
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