As concerns continue to grow for investors due to market volatility and increasingly pessimistic economic forecasts, financial institutions should be paying particular attention. The economic news, coupled with the prospect of more interest rate hikes, not only create conditions for weakening asset quality and earnings but also highlights the importance of measuring these potential impacts on loan portfolios.
All of us are familiar with the term “perfect storm.” A perfect storm can be defined as the occurrence of a highly improbable event. In the context of the perfect storm, the event is improbable because a combination of factors or conditions have to occur or exist either simultaneously or in a particular sequence in order to produce the event. It is the unlikely nature of the simultaneity of multiple factors or conditions that produces the “perfect storm.”
On December 21, the OCC, FDIC and the Fed Board of Governors approved a final rule modifying their regulatory capital rules and providing a phase-in period of three years of the day-one regulatory capital effects of CECL. The final rule will take effect April 1, 2019.
Representing a significant change, the FDIC is requesting comment on a proposed rule that would amend the existing stress testing regulations to increase the minimum threshold for applicability from $10 billion to $250 billion, revise the frequency of required stress tests by FDIC-supervised institutions, and reduce the number of required stress testing scenarios from three to two.
On December 13, the FDIC released FDIC Quarterly¸ a quarterly comprehensive summary of the most current financial results for the banking industry. Within this summary is a featured article titled “2018 Summary of Deposit Highlights: Deposit Growth Slows and Office Decline Continues.”
On December 6, the FDIC announced actions to promote a “more transparent, streamlined, and accountable deposit insurance application process” to encourage the establishment of new, or de novo, banks.
Under the current administration the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been operating under the direction of Mick Mulvaney, who is also the head of the Office of Management and Budget. The Bureau is now poised to have a new director, Kathleen Kraninger, who many industry observers believe will be confirmed.
Commercial banks and savings institutions insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) reported aggregate net income of $62 billion in the third quarter of 2018, up $14 billion (29.3 percent) from a year ago. The improvement in earnings was attributable to higher net operating revenue and a lower effective tax rate.
On October 25, the Fed Board of Governors, the FDIC and the OCC released the 2017 data on small business, small farm and community development lending reported by commercial banks and savings association as required by the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA).
Your fair-lending regression results indicate a statistically significant disparity… now what? In our last blog post, we discussed the importance of a common-sense approach to statistical analysis. One common error in statistical analysis is to assume that a result is practically meaningful just because a result is statistically different from zero. This in not always the case. In fact, finding a statistically significant result may or may not be meaningful.
