There were several articles about this in the press recently, mentioning banks taking an ‘interest’ or ‘equity stake’ in certain developments. Something that the articles failed to talk about was the underlying cause? When property was booming banks were not taking an equity stake, they would finance the deals but they didn’t tend to get in on the action, so why is it that during the downturn they would start to do this?
There are two ways of looking at this, one is the way that a lender would have you believe, the others is to aim for fair comment on what is an objective view.
First of all though, it is important to look at how debt affects liquidity, if a bank is seen to have any problems people start to withdraw money, that’s not speculation, that’s fact, it happened to Northern Rock, IndyMac and several other banks since. So there is no part of the market that is fully convinced when banks say that ‘we are …