Is Our Whole Banking System Catastrophically Insolvent?

A good friend on mine works for a real estate consulting firm in NYC. One of his deals is evaluating a client's investment in an insolvent commercial property. The deal has $110 million bank loan funded by Bank of America. My friend said the property is worth $30-40 million. What I found interesting, and which confirms that banks are not even close to marking their assets properly, is that my buddy said that B of A is carrying the loan on its books at the full $110 million.

I just did a "drive-by" on B of A's latest 10-Q. It has $2.1 trillion in assets, not including cash. It is reporting $257 billion of shareholder equity. Now, BAC is over-marking the above-referenced asset by 70%. Assume across all of its assets, BAC is being generous in its marks by only 10%. This exercise implies that a true mark-to-market of BAC's balance sheet would wipe out BAC's shareholder equity.

Is this unrealistic?  I think, if anything, my analysis errs in the favor of BAC. Why? BAC has $159 billion of home equity loans on its books. We know that, in general, most home equity loans are probably worth nothing. Let's say BAC's are worth 50 cents on the dollar (this is generous). That adjustment alone would reduce BAC's book value by nearly $80 billion.

The bank has a loan loss reserve of 3.8% of its $914 billion in loans.  But the charge-off ratios for residential mortgages and credit cards (not including commercial r/e) was 4.73% in the latest quarter for mortgages and 12.9% for credit cards. Clearly, BAC is unequivocally under-reserving for the purposes of managing earnings and mainting its vital capital ratios.  And we know that the banks are undeniably stretching out their declarations of delinquencies, defaults and charge-offs. 

My point here is that between the home equity loans and the anorexic loan loss reserve, I can demonstrate that BAC's shareholder equity is overstated by at least 50%.  I haven't bothered addressing the larger balance sheet items of residential mortgages (a large portion of which come from its acquisition of Countrywide, which we know was the goliath of toxic mortgage lending) and commercial loans.  Imagine what a realistic assesment of those items would do to BAC's book value.

Then there's the off-balance-sheet toxic waste (like SIV's, CDO's, VIE's and derivatives). I said I did a "drive-by" on BAC's latest 10-Q, meaning I spent a couple hours digging through the footnotes looking for the obvious accounting exploitations the bank used to pervert its accounting presentation.  I wanted to show that Bank of America is technically insolvent. If someone wanted to spend the time dissecting the derivatives disclosures and special purpose financing vehicles, I'm sure it could be shown that Bank of America would collapse tomorrow without the Federal Reserve and taxpayer support tossed its way (please note, most of the Fed support has taxpayer guarantees - you can thank Paulson, Geithner and Bernanke for that goody tossed at the banks).

This whole exercise was started after my "catch up time" phone call with one of my best friends from NYC. After I got off the phone I realized that I had just received an inside look at how distorted the book value of just one of BAC's non-menial commercial loan assets was. Based on this simple analysis, I truly believe that if we could do an accurate forensic accounting at all the big banks, especially Goldman, JPM and Citi, it could be shown that they are all fraudulently overvaluing their assets and thus catastrophically insolvent.