Home » Posts tagged 'banco popular'

Tag Archives: banco popular

Olduvai
Click on image to purchase

Olduvai III: Catacylsm
Click on image to purchase

Post categories

Post Archives by Category

A New Cunning Plan to Allay Banking Jitters is Hatched in Spain

February 28, 2018

A New Cunning Plan to Allay Banking Jitters is Hatched in Spain

But there’s a problem with the plan.

The Spanish Government has a brand new cunning plan to fortify the country’s banking system, which was rocked last year by the collapse of the sixth biggest bank, Banco Popular. It wants the country’s Deposit Guarantee Fund (DGF) to insure the entire bank deposits of large companies, even if those deposits exceed the current limit of €100,000, so that if a bank begins to wobble, its corporate customers don’t take their money out en masse.

The government hopes that the plan will be included in the new banking resolution rules being drawn up by EU banking authorities in the aftermath of Banco Popular’s quickfire resolution last year, the financial daily Cinco Dias reports.

If the law is passed, it would mean that corporate deposits of any amounts would be guaranteed in case of a bank’s resolution. The proposal apparently enjoys the enthusiastic support of Spain’s major banks, large companies, and the president of Spain’s Fund for Orderly Bank Restructuring (FROB), Jaime Ponce. The government also wants the deposits of large public institutions to be covered without limit, as well as those of small and medium size enterprises (SMEs).

The new law would help prevent large scale deposit flight, which became endemic during Spain’s banking crisis and was also instrumental in the collapse of Popular. According to Ponce, if the government’s newly proposed measure had been in force between May and June last year, the frantic run on the bank’s deposits from Popular would never have happened.

In its final days, Popular was bleeding funds at an average rate of €2 billion a day.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Italian Taxpayers To Foot €17 Billion Bill As Rome Bails Out Another Two Insolvent Banks

June 25, 2017

Italian Taxpayers To Foot €17 Billion Bill As Rome Bails Out Another Two Insolvent Banks

Two weeks after the first, and biggest, European bank bail-in took place under the relatively new European bank resolution mechanism, the EBRD, when Spain’s Banco Popular wiped out the holders of its most risky securities, including equity and AT bonds, and then selling what was left of the bank to Santander for €1 – a process that took place without a glitch –  Italy may have just killed any hope of a European banking union, when the bailout of two small banks made a “mockery” of Europe’s new regulation.

Late on Sunday, Italy passed a decree that will effectively sell the good part of the two banks to Intesa, Italy’s second-largest and best-capitalized bank. Intesa said last week that it would be willing to buy the best assets for a token price of €1 as long as the government assumed responsibility for liquidating the banks’ large portfolio of sour loans. As a result, Italy said it would commit as much as €17 billion in taxpayer funds to clean up the two failed “Veneto” banks in one of Italy’s wealthiest regions and support the takeover of their good assets by Intesa Sanpaolo SpA for a token amount. After an emergency cabinet meeting on Sunday, Finance Minister Pier Carlo Padoan said the Italian government will provide Milan-based Intesa with about €5.2 billion euros to allow it to take on Banca Popolare di Vicenza SpA and Veneto Banca SpA assets without hurting capital ratios, The European Commission, in a separate statement, said it approved the plan for the two banks and that it is in-line with state-aid rules.

Unlike the Banco Popular bail-in by Santander, however, Intesa would only take on the good assets. PM Gentiloni said the lenders will be split into good and bad banks and that the firms, with taxpayers on the hook for the bad banks.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is Another Spanish Bank about to Bite the Dust?

June 11, 2017

Is Another Spanish Bank about to Bite the Dust?

Stockholders and junior bondholders fear a “bail-in.”

After its most tumultuous week since the bailout days of 2012, Spain’s banking system is gripped by a climate of fear, uncertainty and distrust. Rather than allaying investor nerves, the shotgun bail-in and sale of Banco Popular to Santander on Tuesday has merely intensified them. For the first time since the Global Financial Crisis, shareholders and subordinate bondholders of a failing Spanish bank were not bailed out by taxpayers; they took risks in order to make a buck, and they bore the consequences. That’s how it should be. But bank investors don’t like not getting bailed out.

Now they’re worrying it could happen again. As Popular’s final days showed, once confidence and trust in a bank vanishes, it’s almost impossible to restore them. The fear has now spread to Spain’s eighth largest lender, Liberbank, a mini-Bankia that was spawned in 2011 from the forced marriage of three failed cajas(savings banks), Cajastur, Caja de Extremadura and Caja Cantabria.

This creature’s shares were sold to the public in May 2013 at an IPO price of €0.40. By April 2014, they were trading above €2, a massive 400% gain. But by April 2015, shares started sinking. By May 2017, they were trading at around €1.20.

But since the bail-in of Popular, Liberbank’s shares have seriously crashed as panicked investors fled. Scenting fresh blood, short sellers were piling in. On Friday alone, shares plunged another 17%. At one point, they were down 38% before bouncing at the close of trading, much of it driven by the bank’s own share buybacks:

In the last three weeks a whole year’s worth of steadily rising gains on the stock market have been completely wiped out. The main causes of concern are the bank’s high risk profile and low coverage rate.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

UBS Warns: Spain’s “Most Italian Bank” Runs Out of Options

January 11, 2017

UBS Warns: Spain’s “Most Italian Bank” Runs Out of Options

The bank-bailout business rages on.

During the first week of 2017, Spain’s “most Italian bank”, Banco Popular, got off to a flying start as its stock outperformed all other major Spanish banks. By Jan 5th its shares had even crossed the €1-line for the first time in nearly a month. But Popular’s New Year fairy tale was not made to last.

Its upward momentum, if that’s the right term, was brought to a halt by a bombshell report from UBS that concludes that Popular’s stock, which already lost three-quarters of its value last year and is down over 90% since 2008, is still overvalued by 20%. In less than an hour, Popular’s shares were back under a euro. That’s life in the penny-stock lane.

According to the report, Popular has a provision deficit of €1.9 billion. In other words, it has nonperforming loans and other toxic assets on its books whose losses would amount to €1.9 billion. But it has not yet booked (or “recognized”) those losses. If it did finally recognize those losses, it could end up with a €2.4 billion capital gap. That’s the equivalent of roughly 60% of its current market cap.

The UBS analysts acknowledged that their previous forecast of the bank’s capacity to absorb loss provisions had been “too optimistic”, with the new estimates showing a lower coverage ratio (46% compared to the previous 50%) and capital ratio (10% instead of 10.8%).

UBS also poured cold water on the idea of Banco Popular further expanding its bad-debt provisions, since doing so would “permanently depress” its profitability, limiting its capacity to create new capital and increasing its regulatory risk. This is bad news for a bank that continues to drown in its own toxic soup eight years after the burst of Spain’s mind-boggling real estate bubble.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Banking Crisis in Spain is Back

May 29, 2016

The Banking Crisis in Spain is Back

The shares of Banco Popular got crushed.

After three years of relative calm and one month before yet another round of do-or-die general elections, the words “banking” and “crisis” are back on the front pages of Spain’s newspapers. Despite the untold billions of euros of public funds lavished on “cleaning up” their balance sheets and the roughly €240 billion of provisions booked against bad debt since December 2007, the banks are just as weak and disaster-prone as they were four years ago.

Francisco González, the President of Spain’s second biggest financial institution, BBVA, was the first to raise the alarm, warning a few days ago that the ECB’s negative interest rate policy “is killing” European banks.

Now, it seems González’s prophecy is already coming true.

Spain’s sixth largest financial institution, Banco Popular, on Wednesday evening announced that it was urgently seeking to raise €2.5 billion in capital in order to shore up its finances. The news took many of the firm’s investors by surprise given that just a month ago the bank’s CEO Francisco Gomez had breezily reported that the bank had a very comfortable core capital level above the regulatory minimum and “one of the best” leverage ratios in the sector.

The market’s response to the latest news was emphatic. The bank’s shares plunged 25% Thursday morning. There was not even the barest flicker of a recovery on Thursday afternoon. On Friday, the stock dropped another 8.2%, to close at €1.59 per share, its lowest in 26 years. Over the three days, the stock plummeted 32%.

For the bank’s shareholders, it’s the second time this has happened in the last four years. In 2012, the bank’s management — virtually man-for-man the same management team as today — pulled the exact same stunt in an effort to stabilize the bank’s finances. The slogan the bank chose to sell that capital increase was “Our Past and Our Present Guarantee Our Future.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts

Olduvai II: Exodus
Click on image to purchase

Click on image to purchase @ FriesenPress