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“Canada Hasn’t Seen A Bank Run Such As This In Decades” – Finance Minister Says Home Capital Bailout Is Possible
“Canada Hasn’t Seen A Bank Run Such As This In Decades” – Finance Minister Says Home Capital Bailout Is Possible
Slowly but surely, Canada is starting to appreciate just how serious the Home Capital failure is, and how the unprecedented bank run that has led to 94% of retail deposits fleeing the troubled lender…
… is just the first step of what will likely be a very painful process, which will likely culminate with either a government bailout, or a financial system on the verge of panic.
Today, the Globe and Mail has published an in-depth report putting the HCG pieces together, or as the G&M itself puts it, the “dramatic story of a financial institution’s near-collapse.”
It was late in the evening on Sunday, April 30, when lawyers working for Home Capital Group Inc. dialled into a call with lawyers representing the company’s new lending syndicate. The troubled mortgage lender had negotiated a $2-billion credit line just days earlier, emergency money the board felt was needed to survive after a high-profile run on deposits at subsidiary Home Trust. The company planned to draw down the first $1-billion from it the next morning, May 1.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Home Capital scandal may presage a slowdown: Don Pittis
Is false income data a symptom of an industry that has run its course?
Could the scandal at Home Capital just be the beginning? The Canadian alternative mortgage company halted its shares after it was revealed that some of its brokers had been falsifying information on the income of mortgage customers.
As the soaring housing markets in Alberta and Saskatchewan go off the boil, a gradual weakening in Canada’s roaring real estate business may reveal more irregularities in the market.
It is a phenomenon we have seen happen so frequently that the uncovering of scandal in a market is often seen as a cause rather that a symptom of a market’s decline. Sometimes they go hand in hand.
On a conference call yesterday Home Capital CEO Gerald Soloway insisted that the problem with its brokers was not an indication of a mortgage fraud crisis across Canada. Home Capital’s delinquencies remain low, and the company says it has stopped doing business with the brokers that investigators had shown to be pretending customers’ income qualified them for mortgages.
Pressure to succeed
It is hard to draw a direct line of cause and effect between the first few scandals in a weakening market and that weakening.
But as markets get into trouble, more and more accounts get shuffled off to the riskier end of the business. Pressure to succeed intensifies. People trying to make a living are more willing to take shortcuts. And it is only as the markets weaken that shortcuts — or outright fraud — are revealed.
There are many examples but the most notorious case is Bernie Madoff, author of what many consider be the biggest swindle in U.S. history. Madoff’s scheme was to accept investors’ money and falsify the income statement on their investment returns. Even as other funds began to do badly, Madoff’s remained strong.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Liar Loans Pop up in Canada’s Magnificent Housing Bubble
Liar Loans Pop up in Canada’s Magnificent Housing Bubble
For a long time, the conservative mortgage lending standards in Canada, including a slew of new ones since 2008, have been touted as one of the reasons why Canada’s magnificent housing bubble, when it implodes, will not take down the financial system, unlike the US housing bubble, which terminated in the Financial Crisis.
Canada is different. Regulators are on top of it. There are strict down payment requirements. Mortgages are full-recourse, so strung-out borrowers couldn’t just mail in their keys and walk away, as they did in the US. And yada-yada-yada.
But Wednesday afterhours, Home Capital Group, Canada’s largest non-bank mortgage lender, threw a monkey wrench into this theory.
Through its subsidiary, Home Trust, the company focuses on “alternative” mortgages: high-profit mortgages to risky borrowers with dented credit or unreliable incomes who don’t qualify for mortgage insurance and were turned down by the banks. They include subprime borrowers.
So it disclosed, upon the urging of the Ontario Securities Commission, the results of an investigation that had been going on secretly since September: “falsification of income information.” Liar loans.
Liar loans had been the scourge of the US housing bust. Lenders were either actively involved or blissfully closed their eyes. And everyone made a ton of money.
So Home Capital revealed that it has suspended “during the period of September 2014 to March 2015, its relationship with 18 independent mortgage brokers and 2 brokerages, for a total of approximately 45 individual mortgage brokers,” who’d together originated nearly C$1 billion in single-family residential mortgages in 2014. That’s 5.3% of the company’s total outstanding loan assets, and 12.5% of its total single-family mortgage originations in 2014.
That’s a big chunk. The company, however, didn’t disclose why it took so long to disclose this.
It said an “external source” had warned it about income falsification on mortgage applications submitted by a number of brokers. Its investigation did not find any evidence of falsified credit scores or property values, it said.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
