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https://www.barrons.com/articles/regional-bank-stocks-fall-jpmorgan-first-republic-pacwest-86c038aa
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A quick rise in interest rates, a large amount of uninsured deposits and a first-quarter update that revealed further weaknesses in its business all contributed to the demise of First Republic Bank, now the second-largest bank blowup since Washington Mutual.
As of Dec. 31, First Republic FRC was ranked as the 14th largest bank in the U.S. by the Federal Reserve with consolidated assets of nearly $213 billion. Washington Mutual had $307 billion of assets as the largest bank failure in U.S. history during the global financial…
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JPMorgan Chase has won the auction to take over fallen First Republic Bank, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. announced early Monday morning.
The deal will see America’s largest bank JPM assume all the deposits and “substantially all the assets” of First Republic FRC, which became the fourth U.S. bank to fail this year.
“Our government invited…
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JPMorgan Chase JPM shares rose 3% in early premarket trade after winning the auction to buy First Republic Bank. JPMorgan said it expects the deal to be modestly earnings per share accretive, generating more than $500 million of incremental net income per year, excluding a $2.6 billion one-time gain and estimated $2 billion of restructuring costs. First Republic shares FRC fell 36% to $2.24, even though neither the FDIC nor JPMorgan release indicates shareholders will get any consideration. JPMorgan said it is not assuming First Republic’s corporate debt or preferred stock. Shares of PNC Financial Services PNC, which…
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JPMorgan Chase has won the auction to take over fallen First Republic Bank, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. announced early Monday morning.
The deal will see America’s largest bank JPM assume all the deposits and “substantially all the assets” of First Republic FRC.
The deal will see First Republic depositors — which include 11 leading…
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U.S. stocks ended April higher on Friday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average booking its best monthly gain since January. Despite renewed focus on stress in the U.S. banking system, major stock indexes were able to post gains on Friday to end the week and month on higher ground, in part as earnings reports from several big technology companies, including Meta Platforms Inc. META were received positively by investors. The Dow DJIA rose about 272 points Friday, or 0.8%, ending near 34,098, according to preliminary FactSet levels. The S&P 500 index SPX posted a 0.8% gain, while the Nasdaq Composite Index COMP advanced…
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Odeon Capital analyst Richard Bove said the steep slide in First Republic Bank FRC stock on Friday is partly attributed to investor sentiment that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. will take over the ailing bank after the closing bell on Friday. “The stock is going to down toward zero because if the FDIC takes over a bank, they do it on a Friday afternoon after the market closes,” Bove said. “The market clearly believes that’s what’s going to happen today.” The FDIC typically acts on a Friday afternoon to give itself time to open the bank up for business on Monday. At last check, First Republic stock was down 37% to…
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U.S. stocks rose on Thursday, on track for their biggest gain in two weeks, as another batch of strong big-tech earnings reports helped boost the broader market while offsetting signs of slowing economic growth.
On Wednesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 229 points, or 0.68%, to 33,302 as worries about First Republic Bank FRC overshadowed upbeat big-tech earnings.
For…
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The Republican-run House of Representatives approved a debt-ceiling bill in a 217-215 vote on Wednesday evening, marking one step in a process that’s getting closely watched by traders worried about a possible U.S. default.
The bill, dubbed the Limit, Save, Grow Act, aims to raise the limit on federal borrowing for a year while also cutting spending. President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats have said the lift should be made without spending cuts or other conditions, but House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his fellow Republicans…
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First Republic Bank engages in the provision of private banking, business banking, real estate lending, and wealth management, including trust and custody services. It operates through the Commercial Banking and Wealth Management segments. The Commercial Banking segment represents most of the operations, including real estate secured lending, retail deposit gathering, private banking activities, mortgage sales and servicing, and managing capital, liquidity, and interest rate risk. The Wealth Management segment consists of the investment management activities of FRIM, First Republic Trust Company, FRTC Delaware, mutual fund activities through third-party providers, the brokerage activities of FRSC, and foreign exchange activities conducted on behalf of clients. The company was founded by James H. Herbert II in February 1985 and is headquartered in San Francisco, CA.
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Moody’s Downgrades 11 Regional Banks, Including Zions, U.S. Bank, Western Alliance
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U.S. stocks closed mostly higher Monday, as bank shares climbed after First Citizens BancShares Inc.
FCNCA,
agreed to buy failed Silicon Valley Bank’s deposits and loans. The Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA,
finished 0.6% higher, while the S&P 500
SPX,
gained 0.2% and the technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite
COMP,
slipped 0.5%, according to preliminary data from FactSet. Regional and big banks helped buoy the S&P 500, with First Republic Bank
FRC,
among the index’s top-performing stocks, FactSet data show. Shares of major Wall Street banks such as Bank of America Corp.
BAC,
Citigroup Inc.
C,
Wells Fargo & Co.
WFC,
and JPMorgan Chase & Co.
JPM,
also saw sharp gains in Monday’s trading session.
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U.S. stocks finished Friday higher, despite a jump in the cost of Deutsche Bank’s credit-default swaps helping to reignite banking-sector worries. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite each booked weekly gains.
For the week, the Dow gained 1.2%, while the S&P 500 rose 1.4% and the Nasdaq advanced 1.7%, according to FactSet data. The Dow snapped two straight weeks of losses, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq each booked back-to-back weekly gains.
U.S. stocks ended modestly higher Friday to notch weekly gains even as worries over the banking system lingered.
Bank concerns have cast a “heavy cloud over the market,” with investors worried about “weak links,” said Yung-Yu Ma, chief investment strategist at BMO Wealth Management, in a phone interview Friday. Ma said he expects investors will be looking to sell, potentially into any rallies, “until some of these clouds are lifted.”
Shares of Germany’s Deutsche Bank AG
DBK,
DB,
dropped Friday, after the cost of insuring the bank against a credit default jumped. The bank’s credit-default swaps had risen to the highest level since late 2018, according to a Reuters report Friday.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced Friday she called an unscheduled meeting of the Financial Stability Oversight Council or FSOC which was created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to help the government combat threats to financial stability. The FSOC issued a short statement after the market closed Friday saying that “while some institutions have come under stress, the U.S. banking system remains sound and resilient”.
“Clearly, somebody thinks there are some concerns there,” said Randy Frederick, managing director of trading and derivatives at Charles Schwab. The problems facing European banks stem back to the era of negative interest rates, which set banks up for large losses on their bond holdings, he said.
The selloff in Deutsche Bank shares weighed on banks in the U.S. and Europe, as banking-sector fears reemerged. Shares of UBS Group
UBS,
which recently agreed to buy rival Credit Suisse Group, fell Friday.
Other major European lenders, including Italy’s UniCredit S.p.A
UCG,
and Spain’s Banco Santander SA
SAN,
also saw their shares sink.
“The thing that’s important to know about financials is there probably are banks that have problems, but there are others that don’t,” Frederick told MarketWatch during a phone interview. “People need to do some research.”
The S&P 500’s financial sector fell 0.1% Friday, according to FactSet data.
While banking-sector woes have hammered the financial sector this month, the outperformance of megacap technology stocks and other sectors have helped prop up the broader U.S. equities market. So far this month, the S&P 500 index is up less than 0.1%, FactSet data show.
Concerns about the fragility of the banking sector have been percolating following a year of the Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest rate hikes. On Wednesday, the Fed announced that it hiked its policy rate by a quarter point to a range of 4.75% to 5% while projecting it could deliver one more 25 basis-point hike in 2023.
In his first comments since the rapid collapse of Silicon Valley Bank two weeks ago, St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard said Friday the latest drop in Treasury yields could help cushion some of the stress facing the banking sector.
Yields on the 2-year Treasury note
TMUBMUSD02Y,
and 10-year Treasury note
TMUBMUSD10Y,
each fell Friday in their third straight week of declines, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Two-year yields slid to 3.777% on Friday, the lowest level since September based on 3 p.m. Eastern time levels, while 10-year Treasury yields dropped to 3.379%, their lowest rate since January.
Read: ‘Red alert recession signals.’ Gundlach expects the Fed to cut rates substantially ‘soon.’
In U.S. economic data, a report Friday on sales of durable goods showed orders fell 1% in February, largely because of waning demand for passenger planes and new cars. Meanwhile, the S&P Global Flash U.S. services-sector index rose to an 11-month high of 53.8 in March.
The role of regional banks in the U.S. economy is “huge,” said Sandi Bragar, chief client officer at wealth management firm Aspiriant, in a phone interview Friday. Bragar said she worries that recent regional bank failures will result in a pullback in lending that leads to slower economic growth and potentially a recession.
“Our stance has been to be very diversified and we have been remaining on the defensive side of things,” she said.
Within equities, that has meant holding “high-quality companies” that should be resilient in “poor economic times,” including stocks in areas such as healthcare, information technology and consumer staples, said Bragar.
DB,
shares dropped 8.5% but finished off lows seen when the German bank’s credit default swaps jumped without an apparent catalyst.
–Steve Goldstein contributed to this report.
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Shortly after Silicon Valley Bank disclosed on March 8 that it was running short of cash and needed to raise capital, First Republic Bank’s epic stock slide began.
The stock
FRC,
has lost 90% of its value in less than two weeks, hitting an all-time low of $12.18 a share on Monday.
Supportive comments from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen helped it snap back on Tuesday, but it’s hovering between positive and negative territory on Wednesday as investors await a key Federal Reserve decision on interest rates.
First Republic finds itself in a tough spot with a low share price and fresh debt downgrades and not even efforts to inject $30 billion into the company’s deposits in a scheme backed by JPMorgan Chase & Co.
JPM,
and a backstop from the U.S. Federal Reserve seem to be helping.
The bank’s troubles stem from its overlap both in clientele and parts of its balance sheet with doomed Silicon Valley Bank, which is being sold off this week by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. after it officially failed on Friday, March 10. Silicon Valley Bank suffered a classic run on a bank, when depositors, nervous that it needed to raise capital, yanked their deposits.
First Republic has suffered the same deposit flight.
As a San Francisco bank with a focus on serving high-end clients, First Republic has acted as wealth manager for the greater Silicon Valley region of executives, managing directors and startup CEOs, as well as their counterparts on the East Coast.
The list incudes Facebook
META,
Founder Mark Zuckerberg, who has a large mortgage courtesy of First Republic, as the Wall Street Journal has reported. Few of its loans ever sour — it had $213 billion in assets at the end of 2022 and $176 billion in deposits.
With its sophisticated lending products and access to the technology startup world, Silicon Valley Bank was also known for its a customer base from the venture capital and private equity world.
Also Read: 24 bank stocks that contrarian bottom-feeders can feast on now
Those well-heeled clients of both banks started running into problems as interest rates rose last year, pundits warned of an economic slowdown and investors switched to a risk-off strategy of conserving cash and containing costs.
The collapse of FTX and strain in the crypto world also fed the need for cold, hard government-backed currency. Rising interest rates made it more expensive to borrow and put a chill on the deal-making environment.
All of this and other factors led to a drain on deposits at Silicon Valley Bank and others as it faced “elevated client cash burn” at a rate that was double pre-2021 levels, even as venture capital and private equity funds were slowing down their capital raising activities, the company said in an ill-fated mid-quarter report.
On March 8 after the market close, Silicon Valley Bank said it planned to sell $2.25 billion in common stock and a type of preferred stock, with one of its major clients, private equity firm General Atlantic, in line to buy $500 million worth. Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
GS,
was handling the deal.
The company also disclosed that it had lost $1.8 billion on the sale of $21 billion in available-for-sale securities on its balance sheet to cover deposit withdrawals.
It was this last part that caused big trouble for First Republic. Not only did its clientele overlap with Silicon Valley Bank, its holdings included some of the same securities that Silicon Valley Bank sold at a loss.
Wall Street investors quickly started bidding down shares of First Republic and other regional banks and the credit rating agencies moved in, cutting the bank’s rating from investment grade deep into junk in just a few days.
None of this helped First Republic hold on to its deposits.
As one longtime banking official said recently, money from Silicon Valley types typically comes in the form of uninsured deposits, which means they’re in excess of the $250,000 that the FDIC will guarantee if a bank goes out of business. This so called hot-money is great for banks when times are good, but can move away quickly if the environment changes.
“When hot money gets nervous, it runs,” former FDIC chairman Bill Isaac told MarketWatch recently.
While an unprecedented effort on March 16 by 11 banks to inject $30 billion into First Republic’s deposits temporarily provided a lift to its stock, the move apparently wasn’t enough.
First Republic said last Thursday that it had borrowed between $20 billion and $109 billion from the Federal Reserve during that week. It also increased short-term borrowing from the Federal Home Loan Bank by $10 billion at a rate of 5.09%.
Jefferies analyst Ken Usdin said the numbers revealed that First Republic’s total deposits had dropped by up to $89 billion in the week ended March 17 past week—or about three times more than the $30 billion injection from the bank.
“With [First Republic’s] earnings profile clearly impaired, the new deposits effectively bridge the estimated $30.5 billion of uninsured deposits still on [the bank’s] balance sheet, providing time for [it] to likely explore a sale,” Usdin said.
Janney Montgomery Scott analyst Tim Coffey said First Republic’s stock drop in recent days reflects uncertainty around what a potential second bailout would look like, or how the bank’s balance sheet is faring after a steep run in deposits and the falling value of its long-dated securities.
Another unknown is the company’s latest Tier 1 capital Ratio, a key measure of a bank’s balance sheet strength.
Like Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic’s balance sheet has had more than the usual exposure to long-dated securities, which have been falling in value as interest rates rise.
A typical mix for a bank of comparable size is to hold about 72% of securities as available for sale. The remaining 28% are held to maturity. First Republic’s mix is reversed with 12% available for sale and 88% held to maturity.
The bank’s mix of longer-dated assets now commands a lower market value, given where interest rates are. The bank’s emphasis on long-dated securities provided a better return when interest rates were near zero, but they have been a liability in the current environment.
“They’ve had duration risk where the value of their securities started going down as interest rates rose,” Coffey told MarketWatch.
Another problem for First Republic is that many of those long-dated securities are in the mortgage business, which has been ailing as interest rates rise.
Plenty of questions remain about First Republic’s situation and whether it could have been avoided. The challenges facing First Republic as well as the demise of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank will be the focus of hearings on Capitol Hill next week.
Wall Street is also awaiting comments from the U.S. Federal Reserve when it updates its interest rate policy later on Wednesday.
And JPMorgan Chase continues to work with First Republic on a potential bailout, even as the bank has reportedly hired Lazard
LAZ,
to weigh strategic alternatives.
All of these factors add to the uncertainty swirling around First Republic, giving investors little reason to go long on the stock for now.
Also Read: 24 bank stocks that contrarian bottom-feeders can feast on now
Related: Senate Banking Chair Sherrod Brown sees bipartisan support for changes to deposit insurance
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Shares of First Republic Bank dropped about 15% in the extended session Tuesday after news that the troubled bank reportedly has hired advisers to review its options and manage the crisis.
First Republic
FRC,
stock rallied 30% in the regular trading day Tuesday, buoyed by reports that JPMorgan Chase & Co.
JPM,
was working to help bolster the bank’s capital.
The Wall Street Journal reported late Tuesday that First Republic had tapped Lazard to help it review its options, and consultant McKinsey for post-crisis planning, citing people familiar with the matter. Options on the table include a sale, a capital infusion and asset sales, the sources said, according to the Journal.
Separately, Reuters reported Tuesday that the bank could downsize if a capital raise fails, and Bloomberg reported First Republic may rely on government backing to facilitate a deal to shore it up.
The bank issued “a message to our clients” late Tuesday, as its stock was falling in after-hours trading, that noted recent “unprecedented events,” and promised an update.
“Our commitment to client service is unchanged, and we remain well-positioned to continue to manage deposit activity,” the statement reads. “Today, as every day, we are processing transactions, opening accounts, funding loans, answering questions, and serving clients’ overall banking and wealth management needs.”
First Republic stock has swung wildly in recent days, ending Monday’s session at a record low, and several trade halts plagued it during the day.
San Francisco-based First Republic last week got $30 billion in deposits from 11 major U.S. banks, but the stock promptly resumed its slide as it suspended its dividend to preserve cash.
That followed the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank earlier this month and contagion fears that have rocked bank stocks.
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Shares of First Republic Bank
FRC,
rocketed 43.7% on heavy volume, putting them on track for a record one-day gain, as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the U.S. government was committed to keeping the banking system safe, and amid reports JPMorgan Chase & Co.
JPM,
was working to help the bank. The previous record rally was 27.0% on March 14, 2023. Trading volume ballooned to 87.8 million shares, already nearly triple the full-day average, and enough to make stock the the most actively traded on major U.S. exchanges. Meanwhile, the stock’s price gain of $5.33 means it has only recovered about 49% of Monday’s $10.85, or 47.1% selloff, that took the stock to a record-low close of $12.18. The stock has plummeted 85.6% year to date, while the SPDR S&P Regional Banking exchange-traded fund
KRE,
has tumbled 22.2% and the S&P 500
SPX,
has gained 3.7%.
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