Q3 Bank Earnings Preview

JPM will kick off earnings season for financials tomorrow, and the whispers seem to be that the quarter is going to be pretty good.  Hopefully JPM will show signs that the banking system is continuing to heal and that profitability is returning.  Whereas a couple of years ago investors would have had a laser like focus on capital and asset quality metrics, this quarter the metrics that I'll be paying close attention to are (among others): Return on Equity, Loan Growth and NIM.  Below are charts of how these have trended for the banking system over the last decade.

While asset quality has gotten a lot better for the aggregate portfolios and charge offs have slowed to pre-recession levels, banks are still holding a lot of non-accrual assets in their residential books.  It will be important to see if the system is taking the opportunity provided by improving housing prices to finally clean their books completely.  This will have major implications for future lending.

What Percent of Bank Holding Company Assets are Held at Commercial Bank Subsidiaries?

The New York Fed is putting together a new banking industry report which can be found here.  It's not as comprehensive as the one that the FDIC puts together on a quarterly basis, but it is valuable in that it goes beyond just the commercial bank subsidiary and looks at the whole bank holding company.  As the following chart shows, less than 80% of assets consolidated on an average Hold Co's balance sheet are held in the commercial bank.  Some other interesting data on BHCs is also below including geographic exposure of systemic assets (i.e. to Europe).

Regions Financial Loan Line Utilization

More from the Barclays Financial Services conference...a slide from Regions Financial, a southern regional bank with +$100B in assets which had a lot of trouble with credit quality during the crisis.  The slide below shows loan line utilization improving.  It's a big step forward for this bank just to not have to focus on credit quality, the fact that they are focusing on loan growth shows how far the banking sector has come since '09.

What would be the impact of a Knight Capital bankruptcy on Financial Markets?

Following a truly amazing $400m snafu at the beginning of yesterday's trading session, Knight Capital shares are down over 50% in today's session.  As of its most recent filings, Knight's capital base is $1.5B on $8B in assets.  The good news is that Knight is significantly less levered than MF Global, which had $45B in assets on a similar capital base.  The bad news is that for any size broker dealer, a loss of confidence can create its own demise.  While I'm not going to handicap a bankruptcy for Knight, trouble for large levered entities and forced liquidations can have significant effects on the broader market.  Luckily, KCG's $8B balance sheet is relatively small compared to some of these other events.  Below is a chart of the S&P 500 with a few of these instances pointed out.

Did the Repeal of Glass Steagall Cause the Financial Crisis?

Sandy Weill, former CEO of Citigroup caused a stir today by commenting that Glass Steagall should be reinstated.  Since he is the person who pioneered the integrated banking model, the comments are shocking.  The comments are puzzling too because even if one thinks that separating commercial and investment banks would create more stability in the long term, it's not entirely clear that the financial crisis stemmed directly from the integration.

Empirically, not a single integrated bank failed in 2008/2009.  Lehman and Bear were not commercial banks, and Indymac and WaMu weren't investment banks.  AIG, Fannie and Freddie were not banks of any sort.  In fact, Goldman and Morgan Stanley (along with some insurance companies) were saved by converting to bank holding companies so that they could access liquidity at the Federal Reserve.

The argument for a separation of commercial and investment banking activities perhaps stems from the belief that depositors ("main street") need to be protected from the volatility of securities markets. However in today's economy, only a tiny portion of household savings is held as deposits anyways, so the savings of main street are far from insulated from a collapse of an investment bank (even if it were separated from the commercial banking system).

Below is a list of bank failures in 2008.  Note that Lehman, Bear, AIG, Fannie and Freddie are not on the list.  In all, 447 banks have failed between 2008-2012.  The vast majority were community banks that were in "less risky" lending businesses.  The fact is that banking is risky business in any form.

2008 Bank Failures

Deposit Growth at US Banks

Citigroup reported strong earnings this morning as did JP Morgan and Wells Fargo last week.  All three banks also reported strong deposit growth as well.  Systemically, despite low interest rates, US banks have been growing deposits at an above average rate.  Y/Y, savings deposits grew by 11.5% as of the week of July 2.  On average, since 1985, savings deposits have grown by 8.4% Y/Y.  The higher than average growth in deposits since '09 suggests that Americans are more comfortable saving via deposits rather than capital markets.