Financial Review with Sinclair Noe
DOW + 111 = 17,055
SPX + 9 = 1977
NAS + 24 = 4440
10 YR YLD + .03 = 2.55%
OIL + .22 = 101.05
GOLD – 32 = 1307.80
SILV – .54 = 21.00
The Dow Industrial Average hit an intraday high of 17,088, but couldn’t close above the old closing high of 17,074 from July 2.
I woke up this morning and checked the Euro markets; the headline read: Global Stocks mostly higher as Portuguese debt concerns ease. Banco Espirito Santo’s parent company sold part of its stake in the bank to pay off short-term debt, so everything is cool. Portuguese bond prices popped. Nothing to see here. Move along, move along.
Just to refresh your memory, Banco Espirito Santo is 25% owned by Espirito Financial Group, which is in turn 49% owned by Espirito Santos Irmaoes, which in turn is wholly owned by Rioforte investments, which in turn is wholly owned by Espirito Santo international. What’s the point of owning a bank if you can’t make loans to yourself; and that’s what happened, until last week, when Espirito Santo International, the parent company failed to make a payment on short-term debt. The collective companies under the Espirito Santo umbrella have borrowed several billion from the bank, and then the bank made about 8 billion euros in loans to Angola, and that has a non-performance rate approaching 90%. And I know you’re wondering why you should be concerned about loans to Angola, and it’s because everything in finance is leveraged. No loan lives in isolation.
Panic ensued. The fear was that creditors and/or depositors might be on the hook in the event of a shortfall; no one could be certain because of a lack of transparency. But the bank says they have a cushion; the parent company sold a few assets to come current on the loan. Hopefully, I’ve cleared up the transparency issue. Regulators say there’s nothing to worry about and they should know because they didn’t see this coming in the first place, and so there’s nothing to worry about; the situation in Portugal is contained, and global stocks moved higher.
Here in the US, we know a thing or two about banks behaving badly. Today, as expected, Citgroup agreed to pay $7 billion to settle civil claims the bank misled investors about toxic mortgage backed securities leading up to the 2008 crash. Citigroup admitted it was aware that “significant percentages” of sample loans did not comply with underwriting guidelines but the bank pooled them into securities anyway. In one 2007 deal, a Citigroup trader told colleagues in an email he had reviewed a due diligence report on the poorest quality loans, and that they “should start praying.” Many of the loans listed unreasonable borrower incomes or home values below the original appraisals, the trader wrote, saying he “would not be surprised if half of these loans went down.” Citigroup still securitized loans from the pool. Quite simply, they knew the mortgage backed securities were full of bad loans, they lied about it to make the sale.
