Mortgage Lender Faces Rush to Withdraw
By ERIC DASH
Published: July 9, 2008
Time is running out for IndyMac Bancorp, one of the faded darlings of the subprime era.
众人到最大的房地产借贷公司挤兑存款
On Tuesday, IndyMac, one of the nation’s largest independent mortgage lenders, faced what amounted to a run on the bank. As depositors rushed to withdraw money, IndyMac’s share price, already in a free fall, spiraled even lower.
每股$50的股票跌到了每股$0.44
The stock, which fetched $50 in 2006, at the height of the housing boom, plunged 38 percent to 44 cents. In two years, more than $3 billion of shareholder value has been wiped out.
加州的Pasadena
A once high-flying offshoot of Countrywide Financial, IndyMac confronts an uncertain future. In a regulatory filing on Tuesday, IndyMac, which is based in Pasadena, Calif., said it had largely stopped making loans and would shut its retail and wholesale lending businesses. In all likelihood, IndyMac will undergo an orderly bankruptcy or be sold, analysts said.
裁员7200人
Depositors’ accounts up to $100,000 are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. But IndyMac said it would no longer accept big deposits. The company is dismissing half of its 7,200 employees. IndyMac is working with regulators to devise a new business plan, but the company has few options, analysts said.
基本是公司清仓大甩卖
On Tuesday, it sold most of its retail mortgage branches to Prospect Mortgage of Northbrook, Ill.. The price was not disclosed. Now, the only parts of IndyMac that are still functioning are its reverse mortgage business and payment collection operations.
房市泡沫坑害了多少人和公司啊
IndyMac is a casualty of the lax lending standards that symbolized the excesses of the subprime market. As home prices soared in recent years, IndyMac carved out a lucrative niche in so-called Alt-A mortgages. Such loans, made to people whose credit is just above subprime, usually do not require borrowers to provide proof of savings or incomes.
炒房者只愿意赚钱不愿意赔钱
But when the housing bubble burst, many Alt-A borrowers were unable or unwilling to pay their mortgages. Wall Street banks, which fostered the growth of subprime lending by bundling the mortgages into securities, balked at buying more loans. IndyMac lost $184 million during the first quarter, and it expects to post an even bigger loss for the second quarter.
In its regulatory filing on Tuesday, IndyMac blamed Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, for fanning worries about its financial health. Last month, Mr. Schumer sent letters to the F.D.I.C. and other regulators warning that IndyMac might fail. His comments prompted regulators to restrict the company’s borrowing. As a result, IndyMac’s so-called operating liquidity dwindled to about $1.7 billion.
Mr. Schumer responded on Tuesday, saying the company’s business practices and poor supervision caused its problems.
IndyMac比起Countrywide只是小巫见大巫
“It is obvious that the breadth of the bad lending that has led to IndyMac’s troubles happened over the last few years, not the last few days,” he said. “In short, IndyMac was a junior version of Countrywide.”
公司基本完蛋了
Because IndyMac no longer has enough capital to satisfy regulators, the company may no longer acquire big deposits from brokers. In a statement on Monday, the company’s chief executive, Michael W. Perry, said: “We don’t expect to be able to raise capital until there is more stability and less uncertainty in the housing and mortgage markets.”
Financial institutions often try to sell assets when they run into trouble. But for IndyMac, that may not be an option. If the company sold assets, they would probably trade at such deep discounts that the move would actually hurt, rather than help, IndyMac’s capital position.
“They are in for a very difficult period,” said Chip MacDonald, a banking lawyer at Jones Day in Atlanta. “They are becoming increasingly boxed in, and their options get narrower.”
IndyMac’s dire straits raise questions about its primary regulator, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and the viability of the thrift business model, which depends heavily on mortgages. Regulators helped orchestrate the sale of Countrywide to Bank of America in December and encouraged Washington Mutual, the nation’s largest savings and loan, to raise capital in the spring. Now IndyMac is in trouble, too.
“On the one hand, they are managing through a difficult environment,” said Frederick Cannon, chief equity strategist of Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. “On the other hand, it raises a more fundamental question about the viability of the thrift industry and the degree that savings and loans took on such significant credit risk. These are some of the largest thrifts in the country.”
