The Institutional Risk Analyst

We have enormous respect for Nierenberg and his team, but wonder why they don't make some obvious adjustments in the business model. For example, NLY has 20% of its capital in agency MSRs and focuses on agency mortgages and MBS, RITM has one of the largest MSR portfolios in the industry and yet is transitioning away from residential mortgages in pursuit of a multi-asset strategy. The result is a business profile that is a challenge to define...

“A higher money price of gold is best read as a symptom of a weaker currency. It isn't really the gold going up, it's the dollar or fiat currency in general going down.” That seems to me to be right. And then he says, “The value of gold lies in being independent from political discretion. Fiat money is a claim on the future discretion of politicians.” Isn't that good?

When President Donald Trump says the Fed should cut interest rates, he is probably right – at least speaking from the perspective of the real estate markets.

Some of the largest banks by assets have dropped from the top quartile into the bottom half of the distribution for the top 100 banks

BMO arguably has the weakest reserve position among the large Canadian banks....

We remind readers that unrealized losses on securities are still a bigger problem for banks than CRE.

Only in the strange confines of Washington do you still find people who think that the federal budget deficit is not a problem.

Banks that do not aggressively reprice liabilities and assets as OZK did in Q1 2023 may be left behind.

How will this above-peer performer from Little Rock do in a Fed-induced recession that rivals 2008 in terms of market losses?

Which US financial will best weather the coming equity market correction?

If you back reserve releases out of Q1 2021 bank results, revenues and earnings were down and trend is headed lower due to QE

Significantly, OZK predicts shrinking CRE loan volumes in 2021....

So is now the time to pick up exposure to US financials? Maybe. Will refinance volumes return to the US mortgage sector? Deo volente. Bank OZK? Thinking (see below). Readers of The Institutional Risk Analyst know that credit metrics for all manner of bank real estate exposures are dramatically skewed in the too-good to be true direction. When will the proverbial pendulum swing the other way?

October 23, 2018 | This past week, readers of The Institutional Risk Analyst awoke to see that banking exemplar Bank of the Ozarks (OZK) had taken a loss on two legacy loans on regional mall properties in the Carolinas. First and foremost, this event shows that commercial real estate many parts of the US have still not recovered from the 2008 bust. Bank OZK, as it is now known since shedding its bank holding company, had previously reserved for the write-down. Our friends a

Goldman Sachs is basically a broker-dealer with a small bank in tow. When you compare the net interest margin of GS with its peers, for example, the other members of Peer Group 1 defined by the FFIEC reported NIM of 3.28% vs 0.41% for GS in Q1’18. Because the bank unit of GS is so small, the overall NIM for the group is 1/10th of its peers compared with total assets.

The Interview: George Gleason, Bank of the Ozarks

June 27, 2017 | Q: Are the annual stress tests good for bank stocks? See discussion on Yahoo Finance by clicking here (Interview starts at 12:30). Early in 2009, when the Federal Reserve Board began the annual exercise of “stress tests” for banks, confidence in the US financial institutions was nonexistent. The year before, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson almost single handedly cratered the US economy by embracing the creation of a “Super SIV” to buy bad assets from the