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The Big Bet Against Italian Banks

November 23, 2018

The Big Bet Against Italian Banks

Italy

The eurozone’s third-largest economy, Italy, is marooned in a deep political and economic crisis, with seeming endless problems: an economy that has barely grown in decades, sky-high unemployment rates, ballooning national debt, an inability to form a stable coalition government and, lately, a looming showdown with the EU over mounting debt.

These have precipitated a wave of populism that has rejected the old establishment and brought in a new guard.

Unfortunately, that has done little to resolve another Italian bugaboo: a massive banking crisis.

European banks have accumulated about $1.2 trillion in bad and non-performing loans (NPLs) that have continued weighing down heavily on their balance sheets. Italian banks are sitting on the biggest pile of bad debt: €224.2B ($255.9B), with NPLs and advances making up nearly a quarter of all loans.

As if that is not bad enough, the banks now have to contend with potentially heavy penalties coming from Brussels after Italy’s recalcitrant leadership refused to revise the country’s fiscal 2019 budget to lower debt and borrowing.

The sharks can already smell the blood in the water, and investors have been shorting Italian banking stocks to death. Italian banks hold nearly a fifth of the country’s government bonds.

(Click to enlarge)

Source: Bloomberg

(Click to enlarge)

Source: Reuters

Short sellers have mainly been targeting medium-sized lenders as well as asset manager Banca Mediolanum and investment bank Mediobanca. According to FIS Astec Analytics data, the volume of these banks’ shares on loan—a good proxy for short interest—has shot to its highest in 15 months.

Short interest on Mediolanum’s shares now stands at 8.7 percent of outstanding shares, while Mediobanca has 15 percent of its shares sold short.

Rome Refuses To Back Down

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

Italian Banks On Verge Of New Crisis After €400 Million Hole Emerges At Banca Carige

November 12, 2018

Italian Banks On Verge Of New Crisis After €400 Million Hole Emerges At Banca Carige

Remember the Italian “doom loop”?

Two months ago we reported that during the first Italian bond market freakout this May over the ascent of the populist due of Salvini-Di Maio to the Italian throne, Italian bank holdings of domestic government bonds rose by a record €28.4bn, more than what was seen during the peak of the European sovereign debt crisis of 2012. Visually, this is what the single biggest month of Italian bank purchases of BTPs in history looked like.

This vicious circle of Country X banks (in this case Italy) buying Country X bonds during times of stress – with the ECB’s trusty backstop – had for years been Europe’s dreaded sovereign bank doom loop. And, as Italy clearly demonstrated, repeated and aggressive attempts by European regulators and policymakers to finally break the “doom loop”, most recently with the introduction of the 2014 BRRD directive, which sought to remove the need for and possibility of bank bailouts, and instead ushered in bail ins, had been an abject failure.

On Monday traders got a harsh reminder of this when Italian banks came under renewed market focus, and selling, due to their inflated holdings of the country’s government bonds whose value has tumbled since May – just as they doubled down on their BTP purchases.

This time, the epicenter of the bank rout was Banca Carige, Italy’s last remaining large problem bank; weakened by years of mismanagement and shareholder infighting, it has fallen behind in the restructuring process that has seen rivals shed bad debts in the past two years. And according to Reuters, healthy Italian banks will be needed to help fill a €400 million hole on Banca Carige’s balance sheet “in order to avert a possible crisis that would further destabilize the sector.”

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

114 Italian Banks (Roughly 23%) Have NPLs Exceeding Tangible Assets

November 27, 2017

114 Italian Banks (Roughly 23%) Have NPLs Exceeding Tangible Assets

114 Italian banks have non-performing loans that exceed tangible assets. Ratios above 100% are signs of severe stress.

The headline image is from the from ilsole24ore.com. The article is dated March 25, 2017. The translated headline reads “Here are the 114 Italian banks at risk for suffering”

The image shows 24 banks where non-performing loans total 200% or more of tangible assets.

The image title “Texas Highest Rate” refers to a measure of banking stress called the “Texas Ratio“.

The Texas Ratio was developed by Gerard Cassidy and others at RBC Capital Markets. It is calculated by dividing the value of the lender’s non-performing assets (NPL + Real Estate Owned) by the sum of its tangible common equity capital and loan loss reserves.

In analyzing Texas banks during the early 1980s recession, Cassidy noted that banks tended to fail when this ratio reached 1:1, or 100%. He noted a similar pattern among New England banks during the recession of the early 1990s.

Texas Ratio Analysis

In 2012, the Dallas Fed did an article on the So-Called Texas Ratio.

“So-called” pertains to a discussion as to whether or not the measured should be renamed the “Georgia Ratio”.

Georgia Ratio?

US vs Italy (6% vs 23%)

At the peak of the SNL crisis in the 1980s, just over 5% of US banks had Texas ratios over 100%.

In the Great Financial crisis the number approached but did not top 6%.

In Italy, 114 of “almost” 500 banks have NPLs that exceed tangible assets. If were to add real estate owned (bank-owned real estate) to the Italian banks, they would be in even worse shape.

2015 Data

The caveat in this analysis is the article’s numbers are from 2015. But are Italian banks better or worse today?

I suspect worse.

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

The Next Italian Bank Threatens to Topple

November 17, 2017

The Next Italian Bank Threatens to Topple

Sharp Dose of Deja Vu for Italy’s Teetering Banks.

In a speech that did little to calm investors’ nerves, Italy’s finance minister said yesterday that he was “strangely optimistic” about Italy’s economic outlook. Senior eurocrats in Brussels are far from convinced. “Italy’s accounts are not improving,” blasted European Commission Vice-President Jyrki Katainen at a press conference yesterday.

The financial situation in Italy, according to Katainen, is due to get worse with Italy’s deficit in 2018 now predicted to be €3.5 billion more than previously stated by Paolo Gentiloni’s administration in the spring. “The only thing I can say in my name is that all Italians should know what the real economic situation in Italy is,” he said.

That real economic situation includes the fragile health of the nation’s banking system which continues to teeter on the edge despite the controversial rescue last summer of Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS) and the resolution of the Popolare di Vicenza and Veneto Banca, which left over 40,000 businesses in Italy’s wealthy Veneto region starved of credit.

It’s pretty clear that investor concerns about the health of Italy’s toxic debt-laden banking system have not been put to rest. Today’s developments will hardly have helped steady nerves after mid-sized lender Carige, with assets of €26 billion, scuttled a capital increase demanded by European authorities when it failed to get the backing of a banking consortium led by Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and Barclays to underwrite the deal.

In a statement, Carige said it had called a board meeting on Thursday morning to discuss “the next steps.” The shares of Genoa-based Carige, which had already lost roughly half its value over the past year, were suspended on Milan’s stock exchange. They closed on Wednesday at €0.17 a piece. The board had fixed a price of €0.10 euro per share for a capital hike of €560 million demanded by regulators.

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

George Friedman: Italy Is the Mother of All Systemic Threats

September 17, 2016

George Friedman: Italy Is the Mother of All Systemic Threats

Italy has been in a crisis for at least eight months, though mainstream media did not recognize it until July. This crisis has nothing to do with Brexit, although opponents of Brexit will claim it does. Even if Britain had voted to stay in the EU, the Italian crisis would still have been gathering speed.

The high level of non-performing loans (NPLs) has been a problem since before Brexit. It is clear that there is nothing in the Italian economy that can reduce them. Only a dramatic improvement in the economy would make it possible to repay these loans. And Europe’s economy cannot improve drastically enough to help. We have been in crisis for quite a while.

Banks were simply carrying loans as non-performing that were actually in default and discounting the NPLs rather than writing them off. But that only hid the obvious. As much as 17 percent of Italy’s loans will not be repaid. This will crush Italian banks’ balance sheets. And this will not only be in Italy.

Italian loans are packaged and resold, and Italian banks take loans from other European banks. These banks in turn have borrowed against Italian debt. Since Italy is the fourth largest economy in Europe, this is the mother of all systemic threats.

Bail-Ins, Not Bail Outs

The only way to help is a government bailout. The problem is that Italy is not only part of the EU, but part of the eurozone. As such, its ability to print its way out of the crisis is limited. In addition, EU regulations make it difficult for governments to bail out banks.

The EU has a concept called a bail-in, which means the depositors and creditors to the bank will lose their money.

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

The Collapse Of Italy’s Banks Threatens To Plunge The European Financial System Into Chaos

March 8, 2016

The Collapse Of Italy’s Banks Threatens To Plunge The European Financial System Into Chaos

Italy Flag Map - Public DomainThe Italian banking system is a “leaning tower” that truly could completely collapse at literally any moment.  And as Italy’s banks begin to go down like dominoes, it is going to set off financial panic all over Europe unlike anything we have ever seen before.  I wrote about the troubles in Italy back in January, but since that time the crisis has escalated.  At this point, Italian banking stocks have declined a whopping 28 percent since the beginning of 2016, and when you look at some of the biggest Italian banks the numbers become even more frightening.  On Monday, shares of Monte dei Paschi were down 4.7 percent, and they have now plummeted 56 percent since the start of the year.  Shares of Carige were down 8 percent, and they have now plunged a total of 58 percent since the start of the year.  This is what a financial crisis looks like, and just like we are seeing in South America, the problems in Italy appear to be significantly accelerating.

So what makes Italy so important?

Well, we all saw how difficult it was for the rest of Europe to come up with a plan to rescue Greece.  But Greece is relatively small – they only have the 44th largest economy in the world.

The Italian economy is far larger.  Italy has the 8th largest economy in the world, and their government debt to GDP ratio is currently sitting at about 132 percent.

There is no way that Europe has the resources or the ability to handle a full meltdown of the Italian financial system.  Unfortunately, that is precisely what is happening.  Italian banks are absolutely drowning in non-performing loans, and as Jeffrey Moore has noted, this potentially represents “the greatest threat to the world’s already burdened financial system”…

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

Italy’s Banking Crisis Spirals Elegantly out of Control

February 16, 2016

Italy’s Banking Crisis Spirals Elegantly out of Control

How to dump toxic waste on the public through the backdoor.

Back during the euro debt crisis, while the ECB was buying government debt from Member States to keep Italian and Spanish government debt from imploding, German politicians fretted out loud about what exactly the ECB was buying. Among them was Frank Schäffler, at the time Member of the Federal Parliament, who in September 2011 said with uncanny accuracy:

“If the ECB continues like this, it will soon buy old bicycles and pay for them with new paper money.”

This is now coming to pass.

Italy, the Eurozone’s third largest economy, is in a full-blown banking crisis. Four small banks were rescued late last year. The big ones are teetering. Their stocks have crashed. They’re saddled with non-performing loans (defined as in default or approaching default). We’re not sure that the full extent of these NPLs is even known.

The number officially tossed around is €201 billion. But even the ECB seems to doubt that number. Its new bank regulator, the Single Supervisory Mechanism, is now seeking additional information about NPLs to get a handle on them.

Other numbers tossed around are over €300 billion, or 18% of total loans outstanding.

The IMF shed an even harsher light on this fiasco. It reported last year that over 80% of the NPLs are corporate loans. Of all corporate loans, 30% were non-performing, with large regional differences, ranging from 17% in some of the northern regions to over 50% in some of the southern regions. The report:

High corporate NPLs reflect both weak profitability in a severe recession as well the heavy indebtedness of many Italian firms, especially SMEs, which are among the highest in the Euro Area. This picture is consistent with corporate survey data which shows nearly 30% of corporate debt is owed by firms whose earnings (before interest and taxes) are insufficient to cover their interest payments.

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

Italy’s Banking Crisis Spirals Elegantly out of Control

February 15, 2016

Italy’s Banking Crisis Spirals Elegantly out of Control

How to dump toxic waste on the public through the backdoor.

Back during the euro debt crisis, while the ECB was buying government debt from Member States to keep Italian and Spanish government debt from imploding, German politicians fretted out loud about what exactly the ECB was buying. Among them was Frank Schäffler, at the time Member of the Federal Parliament, who in September 2011 said with uncanny accuracy:

“If the ECB continues like this, it will soon buy old bicycles and pay for them with new paper money.”

This is now coming to pass.

Italy, the Eurozone’s third largest economy, is in a full-blown banking crisis. Four small banks were rescued late last year. The big ones are teetering. Their stocks have crashed. They’re saddled with non-performing loans (defined as in default or approaching default). We’re not sure that the full extent of these NPLs is even known.

The number officially tossed around is €201 billion. But even the ECB seems to doubt that number. Its new bank regulator, the Single Supervisory Mechanism, is now seeking additional information about NPLs to get a handle on them.

Other numbers tossed around are over €300 billion, or 18% of total loans outstanding.

The IMF shed an even harsher light on this fiasco. It reported last year that over 80% of the NPLs are corporate loans. Of them, 30% were non-performing, with large regional differences, ranging from 17% in some of the northern regions to over 50% in some of the southern regions. The report:

High corporate NPLs reflect both weak profitability in a severe recession as well the heavy indebtedness of many Italian firms, especially SMEs, which are among the highest in the Euro Area. This picture is consistent with corporate survey data which shows nearly 30% of corporate debt is owed by firms whose earnings (before interest and taxes) are insufficient to cover their interest payments.

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

Italian Banks Collapse, Short Sales Banned As Loan Loss Fears Mount

January 18, 2016

Italian Banks Collapse, Short Sales Banned As Loan Loss Fears Mount

Italian bank stocks are crashing (with BMPS down 40% year-to-date) as Reuters reports that investors are growing increasingly nervous about how the sector will cope with lower interest rates and a 200 billion euro ($218 billion) pile of loans that are unlikely to be repaid. The broad banking sector is down 4% with stocks suspended, and in light of this bloodbath, Italian regulators have decided in their wisdom, to ban short-selling of some bank stocks (which has driven hedgers into the CDS market, spking BMPS credit risk).

Italy’s banking index was down over 4 percent with shares in several lenders, including the country’s biggest retail bank Intesa Sanpaolo and the third biggest lender Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, suspended from trading after heavy losses.

Bloodbath for Italian financials in 2016…

But don’t worry:

  • *MONTE PASCHI CEO CONFIRMS FINANCIAL STABILITY OF BANK
  • *MONTE PASCHI CEO: STOCK DECLINE NOT JUSTIFIED BY FUNDAMENTALS

As Reuters reports,

Investors are growing increasingly nervous about how the sector will cope with lower interest rates and a 200 billion euro ($218 billion) pile of loans that are unlikely to be repaid.

Those concerns are trumping expectations about a wave of consolidation set to sweep the sector, with cooperative banks under pressure to merge following a government reform to reduce the number of lenders.

JP Morgan said this month Italian banks should be avoided because low rates are expected to put pressure on revenues more than in other countries and credit problems limit a recovery in provisions.

Traders have suggested exiting investments that have been particularly favoured, such as Popolare di Milano and Intesa, as the stocks have reached key supports.

“I think upside on cooperative banks this year is much more limited,” said a London-based equity sales person.

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

Greek Contagion Spreads As Several Italian Bank Stocks Failed To Open

June 29, 2015

Greek Contagion Spreads As Several Italian Bank Stocks Failed To Open

While things have normalized since the open thanks entirely to the SNB’s aggressive EUR-buying, CHF-selling intervention (good to see that central banks have read the BIS’ report and have learned from their prior intervention mistakes), earlier this morning we got a snapshot of what happens if and when the SNB, and then the ECB itself, finally lose control when as a result of the Greek crisis the contagion promptly spread a few hundred kilometers west to Italy where as the WSJ reported, “several Italian banks failed to start trading on Monday as fears over a Greek debt default induced many investors to shed peripheral stocks, including Italian, with banks suffering the most.”

As the paper reported sales orders on Italian stocks, in particular financial stocks, piled up before the market opening. At the start, the sales orders were so numerous that the system couldn’t manage to process them, something that often happens when specific news causes a sell-off on a stock.

Theoretical prices for Italian banks–the prices at which they would have started trading–hovered around losses of 8% to 10% at the beginning of the trading session.

UniCredit SpA and Intesa Sanpaolo managed to start trading some time after the market opened, but were suspended immediately, accumulating losses of around 6% compared with Friday’s closing prices.

Ironically, in an attempt to avoid just this kind of selling panic, on Sunday, Italy’s banking lobby head Antonio Patuelli dismissed fears of contagion on Italian lenders, saying the country’s banks’ direct exposure to Greece was less than EUR1 billion.

For now the SNB has stabilized things but how much longer will this artificial “stability” continue especially if the just concluded speech by Jean-Claude Juncker managed to antagonize Greeks even further and pushed all those who were on the fence about this Sunday’s coming Greferendum, solidly into the “No” camp.

 

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