Here’s the first of the Thawing the Markets two-part series, by John Mauldin, courtesy of Minyanville. 
Thawing the Markets, Part 1
I’ve been writing for almost a year that the next shoe to drop on US banks would be commercial construction lending. Today we look at some hard numbers.
Construction Lending: The Next Shoe to Drop
The Bank Credit Analyst is one of the more reliable sources for information. They estimate that total losses from the current debt crisis could be anywhere from $1.1 trillion to $1.7 trillion. They estimate roughly half to be in the banking sector, or around $750 billion, and almost $590 billion of that has already been written off. That means that the $700 billion from the TARP (government bailout) program may actually be enough to handle the losses and inject some actual capital into the banks.
The losses from subprime and other mortgage-related loans are well known. Most of those losses are in the larger banks. What isn’t understood as well are the potential losses to which smaller banks are in fact exposed in the area of construction lending. Lisa Marquis Jackson, writing for John Burns Real Estate Consulting, gives us some answers to the question of "how much?"
Outside of large home builders and developers, most lending for construction of homes and commercial property comes from regional and local banks. Look at the graph below. Since 2001, delinquencies had been rather small and well-contained. Then starting 18 months ago, the delinquency rates started rising.
Again, note that these are delinquency rates for business loans from banks and not for individual mortgages.
Click to enlarge.
Over 16% of loans made for condominium construction are now delinquent. Loans made for single-family home construction are only slightly more than 12% overdue. But that masks a much bigger problem. Single-family loans account for 86% of all for-sale residential construction loans outstanding.
The good news is that for the top 100 banks by size, single-family loans make up only 2% of the total. But that small portion totals $245 billion. And condos add another $41 billion. That puts almost $40 billion at risk of default at today’s delinquency levels.
Click to enlarge.
It will be worse for many smaller banks, as they have larger commercial construction loan portfolios. As noted below, this may require some proactive action on the part of regulators.
Lehman at the Center
We now know the consequences of allowing Lehman Brothers to fail. The severity of the credit crisis was severely worsened by the failure of Lehman. Based on the results of the credit auction, sellers of protection will need to make cash payments of more than $270 billion, according to BNP Paribas SA strategist Andrea Cicione. Some funds may be forced to dump assets to meet the payment demands if they haven’t hedged.
How much of that debt will eventually have to be absorbed by various government programs or direct capital infusions? It’s too soon to say, but you can bet it will be a lot.
If there is any good news to this, it’s that much of the write-downs have already been made. It now looks like the Lehman CDS market sorted itself out with no failures, according to the International Swaps and Derivatives Association.
We have dodged a huge bullet. But the anguish this has put the credit markets through was avoidable. The CDS markets must be made to migrate to a regulated clearing entity like the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Next week would be a good time. While there have been serious losses by various players in other exchange-traded markets, there was no systemic risk, as everyone knew the value of their various securities, whether futures or options or other derivatives, and knew they would get their full value when sold.
With Lehman, no one really knew until late Friday. Thus, banks and hedge funds had to sell anything they could in order to meet possible payments or losses, which caused wildly swinging prices in every market.
Iceland Guarantees What?
Iceland is a country of 300,000 people. A few decades ago, they made their money on fishing, farming, and trading. Then they discovered banking and started to take deposits from anywhere and everywhere and make loans outside the country. Soon, the various banks’ assets were over $140 billion, about 10 times the total GDP of the country, and they had far more foreign depositors than citizens. With foreign reserves of just 2 billion euros, what could the government do if there was a crisis?
Now Iceland has had to take over the banks and guarantee deposits. They also had to turn to Russia for a loan. Does anyone think Putin would hand out a no-strings-attached loan? Russia needs a refueling station for its Navy and will likely get it.
Note that Iceland gave its citizens the ability to withdraw money but did not extend that same privilege to the citizens of other countries. England and the Netherlands have already gone to court.
As noted by good friend Dennis Gartman this morning, "Since then, things have only gotten worse, with the UK government moving to freeze the assets of Icelandic companies in the UK, and Her Majesty’s government has said that it will take whatever further actions it deems necessary to protect the assets of British companies and citizens currently held in Iceland, doing ‘whatever is necessary to recover [our] money.’
"Thus, not only are banks fearful of lending money to banks; and not only are banks fearful of lending money to individuals and/or companies; and not only are individuals and/or companies fearful of lending money to the banks, but now nations are fearful of lending to other nations. This is Smoot-Hawley writ large, and of all of the circumstances that have prevailed in the course of the past several days, this is the worst; this is the most difficult to deal with. This is madness."
As noted last week, Ireland set off a feeding frenzy when it guaranteed all deposits in its banking institutions. Five billion euros poured in over the last week. One by one, European governments are having to guarantee their loans to keep money from leaving their institutions.
Let’s look at the Irish guarantee. There are six Irish banks, holding assets of $576 billion. That works out to three times Ireland’s GDP, or about $200,000 for every working person in the country. Yet depositors flooded them with money in just a few days.
This is a sign of panic. On the face of it, how could Ireland really guarantee all the deposits? Yes, there are real assets against the loans, but at what price? Could Ireland borrow enough to make good on even a portion of those assets, should they decide to walk?
