Selling securities backed by defaulted loans to NIRP refugees.
By Don Quijones | 13 April 2017
WOLF STREET — Nerves are beginning to fray in Italy’s banking sector, as pressure rises on the worst hit banks to remove the most noxious elements off their books — most likely at big discounts that will further impair their balance sheets. On Saturday Italy’s finance minister, Pier Carlo Padoan, begged the ECB for more time for the banks to clean up their act.
“We cannot demand that suddenly banks offload their NPLs, because this could be potentially destabilizing, especially if the problem involves several banks in the same banking system,” Padoan told a news conference.
By “several banks,” Padoan means perhaps the 114 banks, of the close to 500 banks in Italy, that have “Texas Ratios” of over 100%. The Texas Ratio, or TR, is calculated by dividing the total value of a bank’s non-performing loans by its tangible book value plus reserves — or as money manager Steve Eisman put it, “all the bad stuff divided by the money you have to pay for all the bad stuff.”
If the TR is over 100%, the bank doesn’t have enough money to “pay for all the bad stuff” and tends to fail. In Italy, 24 banks are estimated to have ratios of over 200%. […]
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