BANKING: Digging Out of the Bad Debt Mess

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Walter Wriston, chairman of First National City Bank of New York, made an unplanned Sunday flight back from sunny Jamaica to snowy Manhattan. David Rockefeller, chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, returned from a stay in Maine and immediately got on the phone in his elegant New York town house.

Both felt they had to draft immediate statements rebutting the scary implications of a story in the Washington Post. Under a headline that sprawled across six columns of the front page, the Post reported that Citibank and Chase had landed on a list kept by the Comptroller of the Currency, a chief U.S. banking regulator, of "problem" banks. Reason: they held a relatively large volume of questionable loans in relation to the capital they had on hand to cushion potential losses. That merited a closer-than-normal watch over their operations by regulators.

Wriston termed the Post story "the moral equivalent of publishing raw data from an outdated FBI file." He insisted that Citi bank's condition is "excellent." Rockefeller called the story "a clear case of irresponsible journalism" and asserted that Chase is "sound, vital and profitable." Comptroller of the Currency James E. Smith noted that all the in formation was taken from outdated reports some l l/2 years old. Both banks have had subsequent inspections and, except for the loan losses, they apparently more than satisfied the examiners. The banks, said Smith, "continue to be among the soundest banking institutions in the world." The Post it self pointed out that neither Citibank nor Chase faces "any immediate financial difficulties." It is believed that the information was leaked to the Post by a low-ranking official with access to the reports. Disclosing the results of a federal examiner's bank report to a newspaper or anyone else is illegal.

But though the Post story was vastly overplayed and gave little perspective, it did touch on real concerns with in the banking community. The comptroller's office no longer keeps the list that the newspaper described, but it did until sometime last year. Citi bank, the second largest U.S. bank, and Chase, the third largest, really had been on the list. And the fact that two such giants could have been deemed in need of extra regulatory attention illustrates the pervasive na ture of some genuine troubles in the nation's banking system. Collectively, the 14,600 U.S. commercial banks are writing off a record number of loans as uncollectible bad debts — an estimated $3 billion for 1975, or 50% more than in 1974 and triple the loan losses of 1973. That write-off figure is not as alarming as it seems considering that as of the end of November, large U.S. commercial banks had a total of $1 19 billion in major loans outstanding. But these losses are eating into profits of banks large and small, including Citi bank and Chase. Some big banks are even reducing dividends paid to their stockholders, a fairly rare occurrence.