Banks acting like teenagers?

I smiled when I heard that Central Bank director Fiona Muldoon had described dealing with the banks as ‘like dealing with troublesome teenagers‘. This was referring to their resistance to resolving their loan book issues for the last five years.

The thing that wasn’t mentioned was ‘why’, and as always, it’s the ‘why’ that plagues many of us the most. The ‘delay and pray’ response is a standard tactic deployed by lenders when they have a crisis, this has occurred in Japan in the past, is currently an issue in Vietnam and also in the USA. Banking is one of the industries where honesty is not the point, survival is. At any time a bank could unwind if everybody made their claims against them and the same broadly holds true for dealing with bad debts.

If a bank started to deal with one bad debt (at a time when there is a pent up mass of them in the …

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How ‘Shared Equity’ in an arrears cases would(n’t) work

This piece is a demonstration of the way in which a a bank will opt for ‘shared equity’ with a home owner who is in arrears as means to keeping them in the property. It is important to remember, the ‘big bad bank’ wants people to stay in a property with arrears, only during a strong upward cycle do they tend to repossess property rapidly. What you will see next is in effect, a legal accounting trick, and one which actually leverages the individual even more.

So the situation at the start shows the asset value versus the value of the underlying security (in fact it is a little more complicated than this but for the sake of explanation the property and asset are the same value). Then along comes a property crash (we had a banking crisis thrown in for good measure).

Now the borrower is 200% leveraged, or at 50% in negative equity (their …

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Current account interest rates are set to drop

Banks have a pool of money called ‘zero rated funds’, this is the money that they hold for which they are paying no interest. Lots of current accounts fall under this category, and banks can figure out with time, the block that is there on a regular basis when you remove the marginal volatility in the funds held at any time.

Imagine you own a money shop and you buy in money and sell it too, in the till you know that no matter what  happens you always seem to have at least €60 in the till, that would be the equivalent of your zero rated funds (hope that makes sense!).

When banks lend they take these zero rated funds and mix them with money bought on the market to come up with ‘blended rates’. So while some money is costing 0% other money might cost 1.269% (that’s today’s 3 month Euribor ), you then get an average of these and depending on what the ‘blend’ or ‘mix’ is your …

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Bank of Scotland cut back on LTV’s

Bank of Scotland recently announced that no longer will support an applicant seeking to borrow 90% for a newly constructed, or second hand property.

In view of the new homes gathering market clearing pace, I feel Bank of Scotland have been a little short sighted here. This profile of the property market accounts for a huge amount of business, especially with builders seeking to offload newly built properties at knock down prices. I don’t think I am being short sighted when I predict fervent activity over the coming months with many first time buyers eyeing dropping prices as an economical godsend, match that with a low rate environment and it gives mobility, choice, and all of this at a price that won’t break the bank.

Paying € 1,100 / € 1,200 for a 2 bed city centre apartment makes sense for people who don’t wish to live with their parents. If we move this on a step further, it makes even more sense to buy. With very low lending rates, you …

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Bank of Scotland cut back on LTV's

Bank of Scotland recently announced that no longer will support an applicant seeking to borrow 90% for a newly constructed, or second hand property.

In view of the new homes gathering market clearing pace, I feel Bank of Scotland have been a little short sighted here. This profile of the property market accounts for a huge amount of business, especially with builders seeking to offload newly built properties at knock down prices. I don’t think I am being short sighted when I predict fervent activity over the coming months with many first time buyers eyeing dropping prices as an economical godsend, match that with a low rate environment and it gives mobility, choice, and all of this at a price that won’t break the bank.

Paying € 1,100 / € 1,200 for a 2 bed city centre apartment makes sense for people who don’t wish to live with their parents. If we move this on a step further, it makes even more sense to buy. With very low lending rates, you …

Read More →

The bailout has arrived, Irish banks in line for Government funds.

The banking bailout has come along, as many of us always thought it would, in the form of a (potential) €10 billion Euro package. An announcement was made yesterday and shares in financial institutions surged on the back of the news. The actual details of the deal are scant at present.

The Minister of Finance remarked on RTE radio that the main thing he hoped to see as a result of this was for lending to return to the market, we can only assume this refers to enterprise lending and not to mortgages as the mortgage market has not frozen to the same degree the business loan/credit area has.

The National Pension Fund Reserve is the area the funds will come from, an obvious issue here is that the fund made losses of c. 33% in the last year and cashing out now will mean those losses are crystallised without hope of return should the markets come back any time soon. …

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