Unofficial Problem Bank list declines to 767 Institutions

This is an unofficial list of Problem Banks compiled only from public sources.

Here is the unofficial problem bank list for May 24, 2013.

Changes and comments from surferdude808:

This week the Unofficial Problem Bank List declined to 767 institutions with assets of $283.7 billion after four removals and one addition. A year ago, the list held 931 institutions with assets of $358.0 billion. The removals were all from unassisted mergers including Centennial Bank, Fountain Valley, CA ($546 million); The Washington Savings Bank, FSB, Bowie, MD ($357 million); First National Bank of Baldwin County, Foley, AL ($187 million); and Kinderhook State Bank, Kinderhook, IL ($18 million). The addition was The Talbot Bank of Easton, Easton, MD ($713 million Ticker: SHBI).

The legal hearing in Nevada on Capitol Bancorp's restraining order to prevent the closing of 1st Commerce Bank, North Las Vegas ($24 million) was sealed by the presiding judge. So there is nothing new to report on that matter. Next week, we anticipate the FDIC will release its enforcement action activity through April 2013 and, perhaps, industry results for the first quarter of 2013, which will include updated figures for the Official Problem Bank List. The institution count difference between the official and the unofficial list was 157 at the last quarterly release and the difference will likely reduce to around 150.

On the unofficial list:

Because the FDIC does not publish the official list, a proxy or unofficial list can be developed by reviewing press releases and published formal enforcement actions issued by the three federal banking regulators, reviewing SEC filings, or through media reports and company announcements describing that the bank is under a formal enforcement action. For the most part, the official problem bank list is comprised of banks with a safety & soundness CAMELS composite rating of 4 or 5 (the banking regulators use the FFIEC rating system known as CAMELS, which stands for the components that receive a rating including Capital adequacy, Asset quality, Management quality, Earnings strength, Liquidity strength, and Sensitivity to market risk. A composite rating is assigned from the components, but it does not result from a simple average of the components. The composite and component rating scale is from 1 to 5, with 1 being the strongest). Customarily, a banking regulator will only issue a safety & soundness formal enforcement when a bank has a composite CAMELS rating of 4 or 5, which reflects an unsafe & unsound financial condition that if not corrected could result in failure. There is high positive correlation between banks with a safety & soundness composite rating of 4 or worse and those listed on the official list. For example, many safety & soundness enforcement actions state in their preamble that an unsafe & sound condition exists, which is the reason for action issuance.

Since 1991, the banking regulators have statutorily been required to publish formal enforcement actions. For many reasons, the banking regulators have a general discomfort publishing any information on open banks especially formal enforcement actions, so not much energy is expended on their part ensuring the completeness of information in the public domain or making its retrieval simple. Given the difficulty for easy retrieval of all banks operating under a safety & soundness formal enforcement action, the unofficial list fills this void as a matter of public interest.

All of the banks on the unofficial list have received a safety & soundness formal enforcement action by a federal banking regulator or there is other information in the public domain such as an SEC filing, media release, or company statement that describe the bank being issued such an action. No confidential or non-public information supports any bank listed and a hypertext link to the public information is provided in the spreadsheet listing. The publishers make every effort to ensure the accuracy of the unofficial list and welcome all feedback and any credible information to support removal of any bank listed erroneously.