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Canada’s Fourth Largest Bank Erases $1 Billion In Excess Capital In Unexpected Accounting Gimmick

October 4, 2016

Canada’s Fourth Largest Bank Erases $1 Billion In Excess Capital In Unexpected Accounting Gimmick

Early in 2016, when oil prices were plunging and when US banks were careful to push up their loan loss reserves to exposed E&P loans, we noted something surprising: Canadian banks had barely taken any loss reserves to their exposure in the oil and gas sector.

As and RBC report calculated at the time, if they used the same average reserve level as that applied by US banks, Canadian banks’ current loss allowance excluding RBC would surge from $170MM to over $2.5 billion, resulting in a substantial hit to earnings, and potentially impairing the banks’ ability to service dividends and future cash distributions.

For months this discrepancy persisted even as oil remained well below last year’s levels, leaving Canadian bank watchers stumped as to just how Canadian banks planned to pull this particular “Exxon” without suffering balance sheet impariment, until this morning when we may have gotten the answer how the local Canadian money centers “planned” to resolve this odd accounting gimmick.

Today Bank of Montreal, perhaps the biggest violator of the loan loss reserve recongition, fell the most in two months after restating it restated its regulatory capital ratios for the first three quarters of the year. As Bloomberg first noticed, the shares slid 1.3% to C$84.72 in morning trade, the most intraday since July 27 and the worst performance in the eight-company S&P/TSX Composite Commercial Banks Index. The stock has gained 8.5 percent since Dec. 31. What was most notable about the restatement is that as one analyst calculated, the move was comparable to erasing C$1.3 billion ($1 billion) of excess capital at Canada’s fourth-largest lender.

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