More than 1,000 banks may fail, analyst estimates

RBC’s Cassidy sharply raises gloomy view, urges avoiding banking stocks
By Alistair Barr, MarketWatch

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — More than 1,000 banks may fail during the next three to five years as the recession intensifies and loan losses climb, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets estimated on Monday.

In 2008, analyst Gerard Cassidy forecast 200 to 300 bank failures, but now he says the environment has deteriorated since then. See 2008 story on bank failures.

"Residential mortgage delinquencies remain at record levels, home-equity loan defaults are steadily rising and residential construction and land loan non-performing assets are skyrocketing for lenders with excess exposure to the weakest housing markets in the U.S.," Cassidy wrote in a note to clients.

"In conjunction with the slowdown in the economy, credit deterioration has accelerated in the commercial and industrial and commercial real estate loan areas," he said.

Since the mortgage-fueled credit crunch erupted in 2007, 34 banks have failed in the U.S. While Washington Mutual became the biggest bank failure in history last year, Cassidy expects most of the banks that collapse will be relatively small, with less than $2 billion in assets.

Cassidy and his colleagues have developed an early-warning system for spotting future trouble at banks using a calculation known as the Texas Ratio. It measures credit problems as a percentage of the capital a lender has available to deal with them.

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