Why Your Bank Is Broke

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Playing with House Money

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To understand why nationalization may be inevitable, you have to get a handle on the true source of the banks' problems. The banking business — at least the way George Bailey practiced it in It's a Wonderful Life — was all about deposits and loans. You take in deposits, on which you pay a relatively low interest rate, say 2%. Then you lend that money to other people at a higher interest rate, say 7%. Pocket the difference. Repeat. But starting in the early 1970s, banks began funding less of their lending with old-fashioned deposits. Bank deposits backed 90% of all loans four decades ago; today they back 60%. Where does the rest of the loan money come from? From the bank's past earnings and the money given to it by its investors. Using the house's money has generated higher profits — with significantly higher risks.

Regulators have long had a lower capital requirement on loans that are not backed by deposits. But in 2004, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) removed rules that capped leverage at 15 to 1 for investment-banking firms like Goldman Sachs. That allowed the firms to vastly expand their lending activities without raising a single new dollar of capital. One big backer of the rule change was reportedly former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who was then Goldman's CEO. By that time, the regulatory separation between investment banks and traditional banks had long since been removed, so traditional banks such as Citigroup and Bank of America shifted more and more of their lending operations to their investment-banking divisions, and leverage took off. By the end of 2007, many banks were lending $30 for every dollar they had in the vault. "Changing the net-capital rule was an unfortunate misjudgment by the SEC," says former SEC official Lee Pickard. "It's one of the leading contributors to the current financial crisis." (See who else is to blame.)

Another way banks sought to boost their profits — at least those available to shareholders — was through stock buybacks. Investors cheer buybacks, because they shrink the number of outstanding shares, boosting a company's profits per share and usually its stock price. But corporate stock purchases also decrease banks' capital, because their earnings are used to purchase shares rather than being retained as cash. Worse, sometimes banks borrow money in order to buy back shares, upping their leverage and lowering their capital at the same time. In the past four years alone, the nation's largest banks, as defined by Standard & Poor's, have spent $300 billion buying back stock.

One of the firms leading the charge to capital-light banking was Bank of America (BofA). Starting in 1993, a predecessor firm became one of the first banks to develop and embrace computer models that were supposed to improve a bank's ability to determine the risk of a particular type of loan. After a merger in 1998 that formed the bank, BofA officials often argued to investors and regulators that these new advanced risk controls meant the bank needed to carry less capital per loan. The officials also frequently fought regulations that would boost capital requirements for them and other banks. In 1998, BofA asserted that tying capital requirements to credit ratings, which would have required banks to hold more funds in the vault to account for the riskiness of subprime loans, was silly.

And to the delight of investors, BofA was pushing for the freedom to make risky loans at the same time it was aggressively repurchasing shares. Since 1998, it has spent $62 billion on share buybacks, according to S&P. The result is that over the past decade, BofA's tangible-capital ratio — the amount of tangible equity in relation to tangible assets — has nearly halved from 5% in 1998 to 2.8% in the third quarter of 2008. It became a bank built on air. (See pictures of scared traders.)

But BofA wasn't alone. By early 2008, nearly all the big banks were poorly positioned to weather a downturn — particularly this downturn. Accounting rules demand that banks take a hit to their earnings by the value of a loan when it becomes clear a borrower is not going to pay it back. When a bank's loan losses are greater than its income, it has to take money from its shareholders' equity account to make up the difference. That's a big deal for a company's investors. If shareholders' equity is wiped out, their stock is effectively worthless. So investors watch this account intensely; if they think shareholders' equity is headed to zero, so too is a bank's stock.

FBR's Miller looked at eight of the largest financial firms in the U.S. and determined that on average, if just 3.4% of their loans go unpaid, their shareholders will be wiped out. The good news is that these firms are so large that 3% of their loan portfolio is a really big number: some $400 billion. The timing of when the loans go bad matters too. If, say, 5% of a bank's loans go bad over 10 years, the bank will survive. It can cover the loan losses with the earnings it gets from all its paying customers. But given the way banks capitalize themselves these days, if 5% of a bank's loan portfolio goes bad in a single year, the bank is toast.

The switch to doing more lending through investment-banking operations has only made matters worse. For deposit-based loans, the banks have wide discretion as to when they record a loss. Some do it after a borrower misses his first payment. Other banks wait until the loan is 120 days past due. But for loans made through a firm's investment-banking division, the bank has to reduce the value of those debts according to what similar pools of loans are worth. This is known as mark-to-market accounting. And when investors grow increasingly nervous that borrowers will not pay back their debts, as they are now, the bonds on which those loans are based plummet in value, even before payments stop coming in. As a result, banks are watching their capital bases erode much faster than their executives ever expected — and probably faster than they can handle.

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