Martin applied four criteria when examining banks’ health:

Banks that made profits in the very difficult fourth quarter of 2008 and first quarter of 2009 are probably in good shape, especially if their loan-loss provisions exceeded their charge-offs (the amount actually lost.)

Banks that lost money in the fourth quarter and first quarter may or may not be in terminal trouble; it depends on the amount of those losses and whether the red ink is expected to continue to flow going forward.

With the run-up in bank stocks in recent weeks, there’s been an accompanying rise in the ratio of share price to book value (stock price per share/book value per share). If that ratio is still below 30% – even after the recent price increases – the market lacks confidence in the bank’s ability to solve its own problems. Unfortunately, the market currently appears to be overly optimistic about some of the banks that still have considerable ongoing problems.

Management’s dividend policy is less of an indicator than it was just a few short months ago; several banks have sharply cut their dividends in order to repay the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) capital they got in late 2008. Reasonably, profitable banks don’t want the government meddling in their business or compensation structures

This research revealed three “hidden gem” banks among the dross. They are (in alphabetical order):

BB&T Corporation (NYSE:BBT) – With $152 billion in assets, and a $3.1 billion TARP investment, this North Carolina-based regional bank has its primary operations in the Mid-Atlantic region. A recent share price of $23.42 meant that BB&T was trading at about 94% of book value. BB&T was profitable in each quarter of 2008 and in the first quarter of 2009, making $1.5 billion for all of last year and $271 million in first quarter of 2009. It maintained its dividend of 47 cents a share for first quarter of 2009, the only bank to maintain its full payout. The question, of course, it whether management will be tempted to follow fashion and cut the dividend next quarter; otherwise, it looks very solid.

State Street Corporation (NYSE:STT) – With $174 billion in assets, and a $2 billion TARP investment, this Boston-based bank is focused chiefly on serving institutional investors worldwide. Its recent share price of $37 meant that State Street was trading at 146% of book value. Its 2008 earnings per share (EPS) of $3.89 represented a year-over-year increase of 13%. First quarter net income down 16%, but State Street still earned $445 million. It pays a quarterly dividend of 24 cents per share. With a global business, conservative leverage and Boston management, State Street is a great risk. But it’s somewhat of an unexciting investment currently as securities issues and trading volume have fallen.

Bank of New York Mellon Corporation (NYSE:BK) – With $237 billion in assets and a $3 billion TARP investment, this New York-based bank has its primary operations in New York and Pennsylvania and has an institutional/corporate orientation. With its recent share price of $26.88, it is trading at 122% of book value. It reported 2008 net income of $1.39 billion, and first quarter profit of $322 million, after which the bank reduced its quarterly dividend from 24 cents to 9 cents a share. Looks solid to me.

U.S. Bancorp (NYSE:USB) has $266 billion in assets, and a $6.6 billion TARP investment and is a regional bank headquartered in Minneapolis that operates primarily in the Midwest and Northwest. A recent share price $18.97 means it is trading at 176% of book value. It reported a 2008 profit of $2.94 billion, and a first quarter profit of $419 million. U.S. Bancorp cut its quarterly dividend from 42.5 cents per common share to 5 cents a share, as it wants to pay back its TARP investment. This bank is in good shape, but its capital base would become too thin if it repaid TARP; I’m not sure I want to pay 11-12 times earnings for this stock when the dividend’s so low and the uncertainties are so high, as there’s still some chance of dilution, should it raise capital.

He may well be right; more interesting is what this tells us about the U.S. banking system going forward.

“The institutions are insolvent,” Roubini said in a Bloomberg Radio interview. “You have to take them over and you have to split them up into three or four national banks, rather than having a humongous monster that is too big to fail.”

But that may be impractical. Citigroup Inc. (C), for example, can sell and is selling peripheral parts of its empire such as Japanese broker Nikko Securities. However, so much of its business involves an international nexus of connections – including its large U.S. operations – that splitting them may be both impractical and excessively value destroying.

However, Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC) showed Thursday what could be achieved by simplicity. It gave investors a preview of its first quarter results, in which it will make record earnings of about $3 billion, or 55 cents a share, after paying preferred stock dividends of $372 million on its $25 billion of preference shares from the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP).

Both the old Wells Fargo and Wachovia Bank, which it acquired last year, are showing good results, with $3.3 billion in loan-loss charge-offs for the combined group – down from $6.1 billion in the fourth quarter of 2008. As a result, bank stocks were up sharply Thursday, continuing their healthy rally over the last six weeks.

Wells Fargo is one of six U.S. banks – Citigroup, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), and Morgan Stanley (MS), Bank of America Corp. (BAC) and JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) – with assets of more than $1 trillion. They are so large they form a separate “top tier” of banks, since the next largest bank, PNC Financial Services (PNC), has assets of only $295 billion.

However, Wells Fargo’s first-quarter success does not mean that all the top-tier banks will do well. Both Wells Fargo and Wachovia were heavily oriented to conventional retail and commercial banking, with massive branch networks all over the United States. The combined Wells Fargo was thus much less reliant on the slumbering investment banking business than other top-tier banks. It was also far less involved in high-risk capital-markets game playing, which got so many other banks in trouble. For example, while Wachovia got $500 million of dubious payouts from American International Group Inc.’s (AIG) dodgy credit default swaps, Wells got nothing, and therefore presumably had no net exposure.

Wells Fargo, in short, is becoming a model of what a nation should require of its behemoths under the “too big to fail” doctrine. It does mostly conventional retail and corporate banking, and provides economically useful services to its nationwide network of clients. It takes few huge risks, and is emerging from 2008’s disaster in pretty good shape. Without the Wachovia acquisition, Wells Fargo could probably have avoided the need for TARP capital.

In my February report on the top 12 U.S. banks, I showed how many of the top banks were in pretty good shape and offered investors good value, which would be demonstrated by higher first quarter earnings going forward. The Financial Select Sector SPDR fund (XLF) is up about 39% since then, so that was a pretty pleasing call.

Of course, what I didn’t get right was that the dogs are up even more in percentage terms than the solid citizens. Citigroup, the biggest bow-wow of them all, has more than doubled. Going forward, I would expect quality to assert itself. While some of the weaker banks should survive, they will be able to take much less advantage of currently juicy lending opportunities than their stronger brethren.

Sorting Out the Winners and Losers

Over the long term, the road forward is clear. Roubini’s suggestion to break up the largest banks – say those with assets of more than $500 billion – may be impracticable. It is also unnecessary. They should simply be tightly restricted, allowed to undertake only “vanilla” banking businesses, without a presence in investment banking, or in high-risk trading.

The market would then sort matters out. Some banks, like Wells Fargo, would probably prefer to remain gigantic, but simple and low-risk – earning a reasonable return, paying their top executives moderately, and having their stock serve as a fine investment for risk-average investors seeking dividend income. Bank of America and JPMorgan might wish to divest their investment banking businesses and move toward this model. The cultural clash between Merrill Lynch and the old Bank of America has been huge, suggesting that their merger has huge negative synergy and that the two institutions would be worth more separated.

The top six’s two investment banks, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, would have no interest in commercial banking, in which they have little history, so would have to downsize dramatically. One possibility is splitting them three ways – an advisory business, a medium-sized institution with a magnificent client base, and a more or less unregulated hedge fund that could be allowed to bankrupt itself in the shadows. They would not be permitted to retain their current huge positions in “principal trading,” an activity of little economic purpose beyond exploiting the firm’s insider information.

As for Citigroup, it seems likely that its troubles are too great and its culture too aggressive for any Wells Fargo-type solution to be possible. Over time, it should almost certainly be liquidated.

Below the top tier, the U.S. regional banks should mostly be in good shape, with a few exceptions that were based in particularly troubled regions or who had been excessively aggressive. In any case, they would not be “too big to fail” and would be allowed to engage modestly in investment banking if they thought it profitable.

Since they would be allowed higher leverage than the behemoths, they would be more profitable. And over time, the banking business might fragment further, which could only be good for competition.

As the world has seen over the past year, the arguments for creating financial services behemoths were spurious. They were too large to manage, and they survived only because their host country taxpayers gave them an implicit guarantee.

Source:  U.S. Banks: Why Only the Simplest Will Succeed

The U.S. House of Representatives voted Thursday to impose a tax rate of 90% on bonuses earned by wage earners of $250,000 or more who are working at banks that received more than $5 billion from the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). The Senate is expected to vote this week on similar legislation, possibly extending the tax to institutions that have received more than $100 million under TARP.

OK, we get it guys: You don’t like American International Group Inc (AIG).

Still, unless you just like 90% tax rates (probably true of about half the House Democratic caucus), you are punishing the innocent along with the guilty. Banks like Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC) and U.S. Bancorp (USB) have received more than $5 billion from TARP, but have yet to record a net annual loss.

The Saga of a (Highly Taxed) British Banker

For those who think taxing the rich at 90% may seem like a good idea, I can give you some practical experience of what happens when you do. Anyone who has paid a 90% tax in the United States is both quite old and quite rich – under the 1954 code, repealed in 1964, you had to be earning over $200,000 to pay tax at 90%, real money in those days, equivalent to over $1.5 million now. However, in Britain, 90% income tax rates lasted until 1979, and kicked in at 20,000 pounds, about $150,000 today. I never quite made that much, being in my 20s then, but I was paying 75% marginally, and it made a HUGE difference to my lifestyle and to those of my fellow bankers.

So, apart from making me feel poor, what did the high marginal rate do for me, as a young merchant banker?

Well, for a start, there were none of these 90-hour weeks you hear about on Wall Street. What the hell would have been the point? We got to the office each morning around 9:45 – not 6 a.m. – and we left at 6 p.m. (5:15 was the “official” quitting time, but we wanted to appear as keen up-and-comers, and figured the extra 45 minutes each day was time well spent).

Our workday was over, but we weren’t exhausted: Every evening, in fact, I’d catch a bus to the British Museum Reading Room, which was open until 9 p.m., and get two-and-a-half hours of work done on my book about great conservatives in British history. Had the book been a best seller (it took me 25 years to find a publisher … although it did get wonderful reviews), the 90% tax rate might have been justified, I suppose, but modest sales was what I saw.

Then there was lunch. Don’t think now of the quick sandwich at the desk, or even the half-hour at the gym. When merchant bankers did lunch, they did it properly.  All banks had in-house dining rooms, where the food was of excellent quality and the wine was superb. You had to invite a client, of course, but there was no requirement that you ever actually did any business with that client, although usually one would spent five or 10 minutes over a very nice port, discussing the market – just in case.

Some of my colleagues found the wine so superb they were quite incapable of rational thought afterwards … but that’s why lunch started at 1 p.m., and not noon, so the firm got at least an hour or two out of them beforehand. Personally, I loved the haute cuisine, which is why I am the shape I am today – do you think I could sue?

The best lunches were the ones where I got Sir John Colville, one of our directors, to host – he had been Winston Churchill’s private secretary, and as soon as the main course was served and the wine poured, he would begin: “When Winston and I were at Casablanca …”

Lucky if you were back at your desk by 4.30 in the afternoon on those days, I can tell you – but it was worth it.

So if Congress wants to make bankers pay taxes at 90%, that’s what they’ll get: Lots of very good lunches, but not many deals. The bankers will be more dyspeptic, and the economy will be poorer, but what the hell: Civilized conversation and an in-depth knowledge of the better claret vintages will once again be the order of the day on Wall Street.

Why Not Spread the Pain?

It does, however, seem more than a little unfair to restrict the benefits of the 90% tax rate to bankers alone. We could, for example, extend it to members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. This wouldn’t be, heaven forbid, on the salaries they earn as congressman and senators – the American public needs their finest efforts during that period. Instead, this new tax rate would levied on the period up through 10 years after they retire from Congress, on the lobbying income they pick up as “beltway bandits.” And here it’s clearly a case of addition by subtraction: The less productivity we get from lobbyists, the better off the country will be.

You could also extend the 90% tax rate to U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner: Why should he not get the full joy of paying the taxes he imposes (and there’ll be no forgetting about those tax payments this time around, Mr. Treasury Secretary!).

U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke could pay those higher taxes, too. And if that made him less eager to continue inflating the money supply after his current term ends in January 2010, well, everything has a downside!

Even President Barack Obama might enjoy them. Again, not on his presidential salary – but he’s such a magnificent speaker, and so young, that you have to believe he will break all records for speaking fees once he leaves the White House. Indeed, 90% of his post-presidential earnings for a decade-long stretch might even make a noticeable dent in the budget deficits he will leave us.

So there you have it – a look at what the world might be like with 90% tax rates. If Congress goes ahead and implements them, I have an obvious stock tip, too: Put your money in one of the new tax havens, where relatively low taxes attract investment and entrepreneurship from all over the world – including such global economic powerhouses as France or Sweden!

Source: Punitive Tax Rates of 90% Could Cause More Problems Than They Cure

The government currently owns $45 billion in preferred Citi shares, or a 7.8% stake of the company. By converting those shares into common stock, the government would increase its stake to 40% at the expense of current shareholders, whose stock would be diluted. The move would be at no additional cost to taxpayers.

Citigroup officials would prefer the government stake be closer to 25% according to The Journal.

By converting the preferred shares into common stock, Citi would bolster its “tangible common equity,” or TCE.  The TCE is a measure of what shareholders would receive if an institution were liquidated. It is expected to be one of the key components of the new financial stress tests being administered by federal regulators.

Those stress tests are scheduled to begin this week and will determine how much – if any – additional money that large financial institutions receive from the government. This additional step is being taken to address a gap in how the U.S. government – under the original Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) – was previously analyzing the health of big banks and other financial institutions, before injecting taxpayer-provided capital. With the stress tests, the Obama administration is aiming to have a better handle on the health of these institutions, and to lessen the odds that additional rounds of rescue money would have to be brought to bear.

Indeed, under this new plan, if the current financial situation deteriorates, the government may resort to take a majority stake in the most troubled lenders. This has raised the specter of bank nationalization, something that has been hotly debated among the country’s leading financial analysts.

The government has already taken controlling interests in insurance giant American International Group Inc. (AIG), and mortgage giants Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE), and now analysts are starting to believe that many financial institutions – Citigroup in particular – are technically insolvent and will ultimately have to be taken over by the government no matter what happens.

“History has shown that those shareholders will likely be wiped out anyway,” Michael Parness, chief executive officer of TrendFund.com, told Cherry Creek News. “Look at Bear Sterns, AIG, Freddie and Fannie Mac. The Fed is trying to be all things to all people and support the system while propping up the stock market.”

Meanwhile, critics have said that nationalization will undermine the entire private financial sector and could cause investors to panic and abandon shares of healthy institutions.

For now, the federal government has given every indication that it will continue to balk at outright nationalization, choosing instead to provide a “temporary” buffer for firms against increased losses during the crisis.

“There’s a very strong commitment on the part of the administration to try to return banks or keep banks private or return them to private hands as quickly as possible,” U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said last week.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs echoed that sentiment at recent press conference.

“This administration continues to strongly believe that a privately held banking system is the correct way to go, ensuring they are regulated sufficiently by this government,” Gibbs said. “That’s been our belief for quite some time and we continue to have that.”

Source:  With Government Talking to Citi About a Larger Stake, Bank Nationalization Still Off the Table

“We asked for $700 billion to purchase troubled assets from financial institutions. At the time, we believed that would be the most effective means of getting credit flowing again,” Paulson said in a statement.

However, “it was clear to me by the time the bill was signed on October 3rd that… purchasing troubled assets – our initial focus – would take time to implement and would not be sufficient given the severity of the problem,” Paulson added. “In consultation with the Federal Reserve, I determined that the most timely, effective step to improve credit market conditions was to strengthen bank balance sheets quickly through direct purchases of equity in banks.”

Paulson said he was considering using remaining bailout funds on a second round of purchases of preferred shares in financial institutions. The Treasury has already committed $250 billion of the $700 billion rescue fund to the purchase of bank stock, and on Monday, used another $40 billion to prop up insurance giant American International Group. Inc. (AIG). That leaves just $60 billion of the initial $350 billion allocation available for use.

Paulson will have to appear before Congress to secure the second half of the $700 billion bailout plan.

Paulson also said he is working with the U.S. Federal Reserve to create a facility to bolster the market for asset-backed securities by funding consumer finance companies.

“With the Federal Reserve we are exploring the development of a potential liquidity facility for highly-rated AAA asset-backed securities,” Paulson said. “We are looking at ways to possibly use the TARP to encourage private investors to come back to this troubled market, by providing them access to federal financing while protecting the taxpayers’ investment.”

Source: Paulson Amends TARP to Include Equity Stakes in Financial Firms and Assistance to Consumer Finance Companies