Is A New Banking Crisis Imminent? Recent Rise In Delinquency Rates Is Shocking
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by Olav Dirkmaat via UFM Market Trends,
The delinquency rate on loans is key in understanding banking. It answers one question: what percentage of loans is overdue for payment? The delinquency rate is by far the most useful indicator for “credit stress.” It seems, however, as if delinquency no longer counts. Few are paying attention to the quick and sudden rise of the delinquency rate. What does it tell us and is a new banking crisis imminent?
This Is What Happened after Janet Yellen Hiked the Fed Funds Rate in December
I have said it many times over and I will repeat it here: the last time around, it took Fed-chairman Alan Greenspan over two years and seventeen rate hikes to bring the Fed funds rate from a then all-time-low of 1% to 5.25%, before the U.S. economy suffered the worst recession since the 1930s. We are not so lucky this time.
Greenspan’s rate hikes didn’t affect delinquency rates straight away. Credit stress was subdued until a year after Greenspan’s last hike. Only in the first quarter of 2007, delinquency rates began to move higher. The reason is as clear as the water surrounding the Bahamas: in the years preceding the Great Recession credit growth was mainly focused on the U.S. housing market.
Credit growth was mostly driven by mortgage lending. Mortgages were generously provided by banks, but increasingly to subprime borrowers (subprime referring to their poor credit). Yet these subprime borrowers didn’t pay higher interest rates on their mortgages the moment Alan Greenspan began hiking rates. But as soon as their (promotional) teaser rates resetted, they started “feeling the Alan.” Delinquency rates went through the roof and the U.S. economy into recession.
Teaser rates, the low initial interest rate a borrower pays for the first few years, were responsible for the lag between Greenspan’s rate hikes and the 2008 recession.
More Fragile
Today, the Federal Reserve is ignoring a very inconvenient truth: the global economy is much more fragile than the last time around. And we have no teaser rates in today’s subprime credit (unless we of course consider oil producers that hedged oil prices by buying futures as something akin to “teaser rates”).
This time around, we will certainly not need seventeen rate hikes or three years before pushing the economy into recession.
In fact, we now know what happened after Janet Yellen increased the Fed funds rate with a mere quarter-percentage point: the delinquency rate on commercial and industrial loans increased 50%. That is right. In a single quarter delinquency rates in the U.S. banking sector exploded from 1% to 1.5%. The cycle has turned.
This Is Why Nobody Is Paying Attention
Why is nobody paying attention to this seemingly undeniable shift in the credit cycle? Why does the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) not even mention it? Why are the alarm bells not ringing in both Fed board rooms and the financial press?
The only answer to these questions is that the Fed is committing a capital sin. The headline number, the delinquency rate on all loans, …read more
Source: Is A New Banking Crisis Imminent? Recent Rise In Delinquency Rates Is Shocking
