Word: loan
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...these windfalls were the chimerical sums of weird accounting conventions. Citi, for example, booked $2.5 billion in gains - without which it would have booked a quarterly loss - because investor fears that it would go under decreased the market value of its liabilities. (Really, it's as perverse as that.) Loan losses are also still rising and could eventually swamp earnings again at many banks. But the first-quarter profits weren't entirely imaginary. As we look ahead, banks really are in a position to make money. "This is a great time to be in banking, you know," said Warren Buffett...
Most mortgages for commercial real estate - office and apartment buildings, hotels, industrial warehouses and shopping malls - are structured as 5-to-10-year loans. After that, the loan is normally refinanced. But the recession has eroded the fundamentals of even good refinancing candidates. Property values have plummeted, with sale prices down as much as 45% from the peak in 2007, Deutsche Bank reports. And vacancies are up - expected by year's end to reach 13.5% for retail and 17% for office buildings - cutting potential income that commercial properties need to make their mortgage payments. Some areas will be even worse...
...same time, underwriting standards have significantly tightened since the boom years of 2005 and 2006, when banks granted loans of up to 95% of a property's appraised value. Today loan-to-value ratios have dropped as low as 60%, so a "very large percentage of outstanding loans simply will not qualify to refinance," said Parkus. (See 25 people to blame for the financial crisis...
...move that may be even more important to the long-term interests of the mainland, the China Development Bank agreed to loan Brazil's oil giant Petrobras (PBR) $10 billion for exploration projects. The South American oil company also apparently agreed to sell China-controlled oil company Sinopec (SNP) crude supplies for the balance of the year. It does not take detective work to come to the conclusion that the two arrangements were related. In late 2007, Petrobras said it had discovered new fields far off its coast that contain as much as 8 billion barrels...
...name in the past. That prompted Stephen Timms, financial secretary to Britain's Treasury, to crow: "We have gone beyond the era of stigma." India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said he viewed Mexico as a precedent, and concurred with Timms. "We are very happy that the [loan] conditions are being relaxed," he said...