Spain’s banks face more loan losses as the pace of an economic slump risks turning a worst-case scenario dismissed in stress tests into reality.
Bad loans as a proportion of total lending jumped to a record 10.5% in August from a restated 10.1% in July as 9.3-billion euros (US$12.2-billion) of loans were newly classified as being in default, according to data published by the Bank of Spain on its website Thursday. The ratio has climbed for 17 straight months from 0.72% in December 2006, before Spain’s property boom turned to bust.
Spanish bank stress tests by management consultants Oliver Wyman have factored in an economic contraction totaling 6.5% from 2012 to 2014 in an adverse scenario that the government and Bank of Spain said has a probability of about 1%. Analysts at Nomura and Citigroup Inc. disagree, saying spending cuts and economic conditions mean the worst-case outcome already looks feasible.
“You can’t attach a 1% probability to a scenario that already looks realistic,” Silvio Peruzzo, a European area economist at Nomura in London, said in a telephone interview Wednesday. Spain’s gross domestic product will shrink by 6.2% from 2012 to 2014, he estimated.
Spain Downgrade
Spain’s request for 100-billion euros of European Union financial aid to shore up its banks is increasing concern about the nation’s growing liabilities. Standard & Poor’s downgraded the country’s debt rating by two levels to BBB-, one step above junk, from BBB+ on Oct. 10, saying it wasn’t clear who will bear the cost of recapitalizing banks.
It cut the ratings of 11 lenders including Banco Santander SA and Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA, Spain’s largest, two days ago, citing the sovereign downgrade.
Spanish banks fell Thursday. Santander declined 1.4% to 6.04 euros by 4:11 p.m. in Madrid trading, while BBVA slipped 0.6% to 6.62 euros.
Lending in Spain’s banking system fell 1.1% in August from July and 5% from the same month a year earlier, the Bank of Spain said. Deposits dropped 1.1% in the month and 8.7% from a year ago.
Economic Growth
Under Oliver Wyman’s worst-case projection, an economic contraction of 4.1% in 2012, 2.1% in 2013 and 0.3% in 2014 would contribute to 270-billion euros of credit losses and a 59.3-billion-euro capital shortfall for banks. The base case foresees shrinkage of 1.7% this year, 0.3% in 2013 and an expansion of 0.3% in 2014. A deeper recession poses the risk that banks will have to raise more capital to cover losses.
Oliver Wyman won’t comment on estimates laid down in the stress tests, an official at Llorente y Cuenca, a Madrid public-relations firm representing Oliver Wyman, said in a telephone interview Wednesday.
Spain commissioned the review as part of terms for its European bailout. Oliver Wyman said in its report on the stress tests that a steering committee that included the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund had deemed its adverse scenario conditions to be “appropriately conservative” relative to Spanish macro-economic indicators over 30 years.
Spanish banks’ loan losses will continue to grow because of the deteriorating economic outlook and rising unemployment, said Ebrahim Rahbari, a London-based economist at Citigroup. He predicted a 5.8% contraction for Spain’s economy between 2012 and 2014.
Adverse Scenario
“The adverse scenario of the test looks closer to a forecast of economic performance over the next three years than a stress case,” Rahbari said in a phone interview. “That surely has consequences for loan-loss rates and the one we are most concerned about is household mortgages.”
Deutsche Bank AG says the economic slump in Spain will be less pronounced, predicting a 1.7% decline in GDP over the period. The economy will grow 0.7% in 2014 after a 2.6% slump this year and in 2013, the bank said.
In a Bloomberg survey of 37 analyst estimates for Spanish economic growth, the average forecast is for a drop of 1.6% in GDP this year and 1.4% in 2013, followed by growth of 0.2% in 2014.
“A contraction of 2.6% over two years is still a hell of a contraction,” Gilles Moec, Deutsche Bank’s co-chief European economist in London, said by telephone Tuesday. A pledge by European Central Bank President Mario Draghi to help bring down Spanish borrowing costs will probably help Spain avoid being sucked into a recessionary “spiral,” he said.
Rising Defaults
The default rate for 604-billion euros of Spanish home mortgages stood at 3.2% in June, according to the Bank of Spain. Banco Santander Chief Executive Officer Alfredo Saenz said in April that anyone saying mortgage defaults are a problem for Spanish banks was “saying something stupid.”
“I think this drop of 6.5% is a number that isn’t going to happen,” said Maria Dolores Dancausa, chief executive officer of Spain’s Bankinter SA, referring to the adverse macro- economic stress test scenario at a Madrid news conference Thursday.
Loans newly-classed as in default fell in the third quarter for Bankinter, said Chief Financial Officer Gloria Ortiz on a webcast for analysts Thursday after the bank published earnings. “We cannot say this is a trend,” she said. “The economic situation is complex so I would be prudent and expect further deterioration of the book next quarter and throughout 2013.”
Jobless Rate
Bad loans and the jobless rate are bound to increase as Spain attempts to cut its budget deficit to 2.8% of GDP in 2014 from 9% at the end of last year, Simon Maughan, a financial industry strategist at Olivetree Securities in London, said last week by telephone.
In the worst case scenario, Oliver Wyman’s stress tests predict unemployment of 25% this year rising to 27% in 2014. The rate will peak at 26% in 2013, according to the average estimate in a Bloomberg survey of 13 analysts.
It may be wrong to suggest, as the Spanish authorities do, that the higher rates of economic contraction estimated by Oliver Wyman are a remote possibility, said Daragh Quinn, a Madrid-based banks analyst at Nomura.
“I think that talk of 1% probability is going to come back to haunt them,” Quinn said in a phone interview.
The bad loans data published Thursday by the Bank of Spain restated the bad loans ratio for July to 10.1% from a previously published 9.86%. The amount of bad loans for July was restated to 173.2-billion euros from a previously published 169.3-billion euros.
Financial Post
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