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Insights for America’s Business Leaders
Building A Fortress Balance Sheet:
Protect Your Bank’s Financial Health While Positioning It For Growth
Executive Summary: - The Vauban Model - Current Market Overview - Stress Testing and the Fortress Balance Sheet - Capital-Raising Strategies
“Ultimately, market participants themselves must address the fundamental sources of financial strains – through deleveraging, raising new capital and improving risk management.”1 – Ben Bernanke
The Vauban Model
Throughout the remainder of the year, banks’ capital needs will accelerate as credit losses are expected to continue, despite easing monetary policies and government intervention. To weather the turbulence in an economy that
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And don’t be alarmed if we continue to see more of this as the market tries to find a floor on valuations. Faced with this situation, you and your management team should take steps to raise capital now if there is a projected capital need. After all, there is no guarantee that market conditions are going to improve in the short term, and they could just as easily erode further.
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“Our primary concern right now – my primary concern – is the stability of our financial system, the orderliness of the markets, and that’s where our focus is.”3 – Henry Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury
Play Strong Defense
In anticipation of that other shoe dropping and the additional credit stress that could ensue, consider the following strategies and start building an unassailable defensive position.
Stress Test Your Asset Classes
Stress testing is a pre-emptive risk management process designed to help determine the impact of charge-offs against your current capital levels and the amount of capital you’ll need to fill the holes caused by lost earnings. This scenario planning enables you to project peak potential losses by asset type within a specified geography over a defined time horizon. Typically, analytics are applied against a range of potential situations:
Estimated Peak Losses: Expected 2008 Charge-off Rates ($MM)
Asset Class 1-4 Family mortgages Estimated
“The Central Bank also raised concerns about the Feds lower interest rate encouraging rising demand for junk bonds and risky real estate investments and shifts in bank balance sheets as areas of concern. Mr. Bernanke said the Fed took these concerns very seriously and noted the central bank had significantly widen its efforts to monitor financial markets as well as greater priority to financial
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Our nation faces many problems, and has for many years. Today’s generations, and especially the mainstream media, seem most concerned with social issues such as abortion and same sex marriage. While these issues are important, our economic situation should receive more urgent attention. Americans are desperate for better days, but lack a meaningful understanding of how our financial system works. Almost 100 years ago, the creation of the Federal Reserve Banking System was instated. One could argue that this system is the base of why we are 18 trillion dollars in debt, and rising. The Federal Reserve Banking System has contributed
The Federal Reserve System is the most powerful institution in the United States economy. Functioning as the central bank of the United States, acting as a regulator, the lender of last resort, and setting the nation’s monetary policy via the Federal Open Market Committee, there is no segment of the American economy unaffected by the Federal Reserve [endnoteRef:1]. This power becomes even more substantial in times of “unusual and exigent circumstances,” as Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act gives authority to the Board of Governors to act unilaterally in lending and market making operations during financial crisis[endnoteRef:2]. As illustrated by their decision making in the aftermath of the 2007-2008 Great Recession,
Had the Fed kept to one school of thought instead of vacillating between predictions of doom and gloom and then back again to all is well our nation might have bounced back more quickly from the burst bubble and the recession (Lowrey, 2014). It is this vacillation and “wait and see” attitude that clouds many economists’ thinking. Most of the time making small adjustments to the market and waiting it out is okay, but when things start to fall apart some vision is needed to spur the Fed into action and prevent another crisis. According to Mark Thoma at The Fiscal Times:
The balance sheet (BS) is significant to a business due to its ability to provide a “snapshot” of a company’s assets and liabilities at any given time. This financial document is a cursory representation of a business’s health. The use of comparative BS whether it be yearly, quarterly, or monthly provides the interested parties a tool to observe trends that are positive, negative, or neutral to a company’s financial health (Finkler, Jones, and Koyner,2013) .
Maintaining the stability of the financial system and containing systemic risk that may arise in financial markets.
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The professional’s feet were facing forward. The position let her body being balanced. It would let her bump the ball perfectly in the air. If her feet were facing at a different direction like before, she might’ve lost her balance since she was standing now.
We all know from our course that leverage and liquidity risks of financial institutions are vulnerable to the crisis. The financial crisis that emerged in 2007 had many and varied causes, but one of its most
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The course project involved developing a great depth of knowledge in analyzing capital structure, theories behind it, and its risks and issues. Before I began this assignment, I knew nothing but a few things about capital structure from previous unit weeks; however, it was not until this course’s final project that came along with opening
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The figure of Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the FED from 2006 to 2014, played a key role in determining the success and the accuracy of FED’s policies during this financial crisis and during its recovery. Aim of this work will be not only to delineate and analyze what are the major actions undertaken by the FED during this financial crisis, but also to investigate their effects, and the consensus on their positive effects for the recovery of the US economy.