Odds and Ends

US banks get new rules on property

By admin ⋅ October 31, 2009 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

From WSJ:
“[US] banks have generally been keeping a lid on commercial real-estate losses by extending these mortgages upon maturity. However, that practice, billed by many industry observers as “extending and pretending,” has come under criticism by some analysts and investors as it promises to put off the pains into the future…

Critics say the new rules are yet another example of a head-in-the-sand approach by regulators, pointing to the relaxed accounting standards last year that enabled banks to avoid marking the value of the loans down. This is doing long-term damage to the economy, they say, because it ties up bank capital, preventing them from resuming lending.

Critics say a wiser approach would be for regulators and banks to deal with problems quickly like the Resolution Trust Corp. did in the early 1990s during the last commercial real-estate crash. Back then, the RTC helped purge the financial system of toxic mortgages”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125694507086819833.html?mod=rss_whats_news_us

Tags: Economics, economy, Irish banking, NAMA, politics