My blog title comes from the title of an article, “Bank failures to surge in coming years” by MarketWatch on 23 May 2008. I highly recommend reading the full article. It mentions that only 3 banks have actually failed so far in 2008. But that number will go much higher as distress from [...]

I have posted a few times on the problem surrounding an imminent writedown wave for commercial real estate (CRE) and construction loans in the US. A few days back, I had intended to post more about regionals. The Wall Street Journal had a good article about this problem, singling out Wachovia and Bank of [...]

The President of the Boston Fed, Eric Rosengren, has in effect said that small and regional banks are at risk in the next wave of writedowns for U.S. financial institutions. He sites construction loan exposure in particular as a place to worry. I give the story of small and regional exposure to construction [...]

I am wary of regional banks for good reason. KeyCorp came out with a disastrous earnings report yesterday and was promptly whacked by the market. The regionals have way to much exposure to commercial real estate (CRE) and construction loans. And in the next leg down of this downturn, that is where [...]

The US regional banks are certainly the next set of financial institutions in the US that are going to get hit by the credit crisis. While these banks did not have significant exposure to the CDOs and RMBSs and other types of derivative instruments that have caused the majority of writedowns to date, they do have large exposure to the housing and construction industry.