The Institutional Risk Analyst

New York | In the most recent edition of The IRA Bank Book, we note that the rate of increase in funding costs for US banks in 2018 was a bit over 70% year-over year. The rate of change in this key component of bank earnings is not particularly correlated to the broad swings in market interest rates and, by implication, investor confidence. But the normalization of bank funding costs is relentless. As we describe in some detail in the IRA Bank Book for Q1 2019, rising bank

Washington | Consider the irony of the American housing sector. In the District of Columbia, various pundits, market retreads and spin-meisters (many employed by hedge funds) obsessively focus on "reforming" the government sponsored enterprises known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, together the “GSEs.” The third and largest GSE, the Federal Home Loan Banks, along with the fourth, the Government National Mortgage Association or Ginnie Mae, are also included in the prospective

In the mid 2000s, just before the financial crisis began, US banks were reporting credit metrics for all asset classes in loan portfolios that were quite literally too good to be true. And they were. The cost of bad credit decisions was hidden, for a time, by rising asset prices. The same aggressive, low-rate environment used by the Fed to artificially stoke growth in the early 2000s has been repeated in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, only to a greater extreme. Today US