Friday, March 12, 2010

“FDIC Said to Prepare $3 Billion AmTrust Loans Sale (Update1) (Bloomberg)” plus 2 more

“FDIC Said to Prepare $3 Billion AmTrust Loans Sale (Update1) (Bloomberg)” plus 2 more

FDIC Said to Prepare $3 Billion AmTrust Loans Sale (Update1) (Bloomberg)

Posted: 12 Mar 2010 02:29 PM PST

By John Gittelsohn and Jonathan Keehner

March 12 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is preparing to sell $3 billion of loans from AmTrust Bank, the Cleveland-based lender seized by regulators in December, people involved in the sales said.

Barclays Capital Inc. is getting ready to solicit bids for a $2 billion portfolio of loans from AmTrust, said one of the people involved in the sale. Stifel Nicolaus & Co. will take bids for $1 billion of mostly non-performing home loans in May or June, according to two of the people, who asked not to be named because the terms haven't been completed.

The FDIC is disposing of real estate, soured mortgages and personal property ranging from tour buses to palm trees that once belonged to failed banks. The agency hired Barclays, Stifel and 12 other firms to perform structured-asset sales, in which investors become limited partners to share the proceeds from liquidating distressed loans. The FDIC has completed at least 10 such deals with a book value of $14.75 billion since May 2008.

"There's a lot more that's probably going to come to market when you look at the size of the issue that this downturn has really created," Jeffrey Krasnoff, chairman of Lennar Corp.'s Rialto Capital Management, said in a March 10 interview. Lennar, a Miami-based homebuilder, bought a share of $3.05 billion in FDIC loans in February.

Kristin Friel, a New York-based Barclays spokeswoman, declined to comment. Victor Nesi, a spokesman for Stifel Nicolaus in New York, didn't immediately return a phone message seeking comment.

'Potential Upside'

David Barr, a spokesman for the FDIC in Washington, said the agency doesn't comment on specific future offerings.

"We have to sell in today's market," Barr said of structured-asset sales. "The structured transactions allow us to capture any potential upside in the future."

As of yesterday, 167 FDIC-insured lenders have failed since the start of 2009. The tally may increase this year, with 702 firms on the FDIC's "problem bank" list as of Dec. 31.

New York Community Bank took over $9 billion of the $12 billion in assets on AmTrust's books when it was seized by regulators Dec. 4.

Deutsche Bank Securities Inc., HSBC Securities (USA) Inc. and RBS Securities Inc. are also preparing portfolios of FDIC loans for structured-asset sales, according to Asset-Backed Alert. The industry newsletter first reported the Stifel Nicolaus offering.

Mission Capital Advisors LLC is preparing to sell $610 million in unpaid loans the FDIC is holding from failed U.S. lenders including IndyMac Bank, Silverton Bank and New Frontier Bank, according to the firm's Web site.

To contact the reporter on this story: John Gittelsohn in New York at johngitt@bloomberg.net; Jonathan Keehner in New York at jkeehner@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: March 12, 2010 16:19 EST

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.



image

Community Capital Bank triples loans (Richmond Times-Dispatch)

Posted: 11 Mar 2010 09:13 PM PST

Usually, bankers like to hear your Plan A, then your Plan B -- and then take your collateral before lending to your business.

But a novel new bank -- it is owned by a nonprofit organization-- is doing all right by skipping the Plan B discussion about the personal assets a borrower would use if a basic business plan fails.

When the mission is financing community development, many of the small-business owners or nonprofit volunteers involved don't have much in personal assets, said Jane N. Henderson, president of Virginia Community Capital Inc., a nonprofit loan pool based in Christiansburg.

Still, they are worth lending to -- if Plan A makes sense.

"Our customers continue to pay, and their projects or businesses continue to appear strong," she said.

Virginia Community's new bank, Community Capital Bank, completed its first full year of operations by posting a small $113,000 loss for 2009 -- while seeing loans triple, to $8.4 million, at a time when most banks reported little activity.

"We are seeing a lot of demand for affordable housing and community medical centers," Henderson said. "We have been able to step in and fill a gap created by the credit crunch."

Despite the growth, Community Capital isn't making crazy loans. The percentage of its loans that are 30 days past due is just 0.19 percent, or about a tenth of what large commercial banks are reporting for their multifamily housing and business loans. None of its loans is more than 90 days past due.

Community Capital and its parent operate across the state. In Richmond, it is helping finance the Better Housing Coalition's effort to turn the old Beckstoffer's shop on Church Hill into housing, with a $475,000 loan.

The coalition's chief operating officer, Bob Newman, has said the project wouldn't be possible without the loan.

Last year, Community Capital provided a $100,000 line of credit that gives Virginia Supportive Housing an operating reserve for its housing and support services for the homeless and people with disabilities.

"We were looking for a loan during one of the worst times in our economy, and were unsuccessful until [Community Capital] stepped in," said Executive Director Alice Tousignant.

Virginia Community got going in late 2005, with a $15 million grant from the state. In late 2008, the nonprofit loan pool took the unusual step of setting up a bank. Because the bank has capital, it can lend more money than a simple pool of funds can.


Contact David Ress at (804) 6496051 or .

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.



image

Fed emergency loans decline in past week (Washington Post)

Posted: 11 Mar 2010 02:05 PM PST

The Fed reported that daily borrowing from its emergency loan program averaged $13.73 billion for the week ended Wednesday. That was down by $43 million from daily average borrowing of $13.77 billion in the previous week.

At the height of the financial crisis, emergency borrowing from the Fed's discount window had exceeded $100 billion a day.

The Fed last month increased the interest rate it charges on discount window borrowing by a quarter-point to 0.75 percent as part of efforts to unwind the exceptional support it had been providing to banks during the financial crisis, which struck with force in the fall of 2008.

However, the central bank stressed that the increase in the discount rate charged to make direct loans to banks was not a signal that it planned to increase its target for the federal funds rate which has been at a record low of zero to 0.25 percent since December 2008.

Fed policymakers will meet next Tuesday to review interest rates but there is no expectation that the central bank will move to boost the funds rate, the overnight bank lending rate which effects a wide variety of consumer and business loans. Some economists believe the Fed could leave the funds rate unchanged until late in 2010 to give the economy a chance to recover further from the worst recession since the 1930s.

The central bank is phasing out a number of emergency programs that it had created to deal with the financial crisis.

The Fed's balance sheet - a broad measure that tracks the Fed's lending activities - stood at $2.29 trillion for the past week, more than double the level before the financial crisis struck even with all the moves to phase out various emergency programs.

The central bank's holdings of mortgage-backed securities averaged $1.03 trillion in the past week, up by $663 million from the previous week. The Fed's goal is to hit a level of $1.25 trillion in mortgage securities from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by the end of this month.

At that time, new purchases will case but Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has said the central bank intends to maintain those holdings in a continued effort to keep mortgage rates low and support a recovery in housing.

Freddie Mac said Thursday that the national average for 30-year mortgage rates stood at 4.95 percent this week, down from 4.97 percent last week. This rate hit a record low of 4.71 percent in December and has hovered around 5 percent since that time, kept down by the Fed's campaign to lower mortgage rates to bolster the housing market.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.



image

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Posted by Rakhma at 4:04 PM

0 comments:

Post a Comment