Correspondent Blog

With the market staring at an early close today and the prospects of a three-day weekend, market movement is likely to be quiet as traders square positions and get ready to head for the door. While the Memorial Day weekend has typically signaled the beginning of summer and all manner of outdoor activities, this year…

During the last ten years of economic expansion, prudent bankers were planning for the next downturn. Everyone knew that the economic expansion would end, but no one could be sure when or how. Smart bankers managed their business by accepting that all expansions do eventually reverse. None of us can predict the future, but enterprising…

Coming into the streamed testimony of Fed Chair Jay Powell and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to the Senate Banking Committee yesterday, the most asked question was how forcefully would Powell be in following up his comments last week that more fiscal stimulus  may be needed. The answer to that question was essentially a repeat from…

While it is too soon to get the data on bank commercial real estate (CRE) portfolio delinquencies and forbearances, we take our benchmarks from the commercial mortgage-backed securities market as of May 14th. As any commercial banker can tell you, hospitality and retail remain under the most pressure, jumping up more than 5x and 3x,…

Last Friday night, the SBA released the long-awaited Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) application, and while it clarified some aspects of the program, its complexity also surprised many bankers. In the SBA’s defense, it is hard to strike the right balance of speed to market, simplicity, and breadth of idea inclusion, so overall, we must give…

Reopenings, Vaccines, and Fiscal Stimulus Much like the last several weeks, trading will once again be focused on assessing the status of the partial reopenings and any virus news. On that latter front, some upbeat news on phase 1 vaccine trials has set the market on a risk-on mood this morning.  Last week, equity markets…

While the equity markets have been trying to look past the current economic numbers and focus on reopenings, and the hopes of better times to come, we did get retail sales numbers this morning and like most of the other April reports it paints a gruesome picture. Given the consumption-focused nature of our economy it…

Investors will be focused on comments this morning from Fed Chair Powell at a live stream event with the Patterson Institute for International Economics. Possibly the most intriguing thing the market will be looking for is Powell’s resolve to resist negative interest rates. No current FOMC member has expressed a willingness to go there but…

In past articles, we discussed a proposed Coronavirus stress test under CCAR and provided our COVID-19 probabilities of default and loss given defaults for a model bank portfolio. In this article, we update our CRE modeling and take a deeper dive into loan-level analysis in order to help banks triage and manage both individual credits…

We have blogged about checklists for returning to work and the models available to bankers to decide when to call employees to the workplace. In this article, we describe specific protocols for returning employees to a bank office, which will have no customer interaction – a much easier protocol than a bank branch reopening to…

Trading this week will once again focus on any news regarding partial economic reopenings in various states and localities. Last week, equity markets resumed their optimistic run while Treasuries assumed their more circumspect role after a mid-week softening following larger-than-expected funding plans by the Treasury. The April jobs report was every bit as bad as…

 The worst employment report in our lifetime is out and the market reaction is mixed. That’s because the May report is likely to be even worse and the range of estimates in this one were so wide that the only deeply held conviction had to be, “it’s gonna be bad.”  Also, as we’ve often mentioned…