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Investing and Economics Blog

A Banker Who Avoided Toxic Debt Bubble

The Banker Who Said No

n late 2006 he sold $74 million of preferred stock although he had no immediate use for the proceeds. He says he couldn’t resist the “stupidly mispriced” terms–as low as Libor plus 1.7 percentage points for 30 years. He wanted as much money available when the boom turned to bust. With the extra money the bank could pay off nearly all its depositors with capital on hand–nearly unheard of in the history of banking.

Then came a shocker: Amid one of the most reckless lending sprees in history, regulators focused on the one bank that refused to play along. Beal’s moves confused and worried them, and so they began to probe him with questions. “What are you doing?” he recalls them asking. “You’re shrinking yet you’re raising capital?”

Says Beal about the scrutiny, “I just didn’t fit into any box.” One regulator, the former head of the Texas Savings & Loan Department, Charles Danny Payne, says, “I was skeptical at first, but I’ve gained a lot of confidence over the years,” adding that Beal has an “uncanny ability to sniff out deals.”

Next, the credit rating agencies started pestering him about his dwindling loan portfolio. They never downgraded him but scolded him for seeming not to have a “sustainable” business model. This while their colleagues were signing off on $32 billion of bum collateralized debt obligations issued by Merrill Lynch.
…
He thinks the government is going to be “disappointed” by its various programs to revive lending. He says Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s new plan to guarantee loans to buyers of toxic assets won’t lead to many sales because the problem isn’t liquidity but price. They are not low enough. Half the country’s banks–4,000 in all–would be bust, he says, if they marked their loans to what the loans would fetch in an auction. He says banks are fooling themselves by refusing to mark busted assets down.

“Banks are on a prayer mission that somehow prices will come back and they won’t have to face reality,” Beal says. And that reality, according to Beal, is going to get a lot worse. “Unemployment is going over 10%, commercial real estate hasn’t even begun collapsing and corporate credit defaults are just getting started,” he says. His prediction: depression, without bread lines this time, thanks to the government safety net, but with equal cost to society.

There are some (very few) who succeeded in not acting like lemmings. I wish someone would explain to me why people are worthy of millions in bonuses when they just do what every single other person in their position did that was also getting millions in bonuses. Obviously they were just practicing bankruptcy for profit (which worked out incredibly well for them) and still we seem to think the only solution is to support these moral bankrupt (and now commercially bankrupt) organizations and individuals.

Related: What the Bailout and Stimulus Are and Are Not – Sound Canadian Banking System – More on Failed Executives – Jim Rogers on the Financial Market Mess

April 4th, 2009 John Hunter | Leave a Comment | Tags: Investing, Real Estate

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