This March has been a wild month in the world of finance. So far, three banks in the USA have collapsed, including Silicon Valley Bank, the 16th largest bank in the country with US$209 billion in assets at the end of 2022. Meanwhile, First Republic Bank, ranked 14th in America with US$212 billion in assets, has seen a 90% month-to-date decline in its share price. Over in Europe, the Swiss bank Credit Suisse, with a market capitalization of US$8.6 billion on the 17th, was forced by regulators to agree to be acquired by its national peer, UBS, for just over US$3 billion on the 19th.
The issues plaguing the troubled banks have much to do with the sharp rise in interest rates seen in the USA and Europe that began in earnest in the third quarter of 2022. For context, the Federal Funds Rate – the key interest rate benchmark in the USA – rose from a target range of 1.5%-1.75% at the end of June 2022 to 4.5%-4.75% right now. Over the same period, the key interest rate benchmarks in the European Union rose from a range of -0.5% to 0.25%, to a range of 3.0% to 3.75%. Given the aforementioned banking failures, it’s clear that rising interest rates are already a big problem for banks. But there could be more pain ahead for banks who fail to understand a lesson from an old banking crisis in the USA.
A blast from the past
The Savings & Loan (S&L) crisis started in the early 1980s and stretched into the early 1990s. There were nearly 4,000 S&L institutions in the USA in 1980; by 1989, 563 of them had failed. S&L institutions are also known as thrift banks and savings banks. They provide similar services as commercial banks, such as deposit products, loans, and mortgages. But S&L institutions have a heavier emphasis on mortgages as opposed to commercial banks, which tend to also focus on business and personal lending.
In the early 1980s, major changes were made to the regulations governing S&L institutions and these reforms sparked the crisis. One of the key changes was the removal of caps on the interest rates that S&L institutions could offer for deposits. Other important changes included the removal of loan-to-value ratios on the loans that S&L institutions could make, and the relaxation on the types of assets that they could own.
The regulatory changes were made to ease two major problems that S&L institutions were confronting. First, since the rates they could offer were limited by the government, S&L institutions found it increasingly difficult to compete for deposits after interest rates rose dramatically in the late 1970s. Second, the mortgage loans that S&L institutions made were primarily long-term fixed rate mortgages; the rise in interest rates caused the value of these mortgage loans to fall. The US government thought that S&L institutions could cope better if they were deregulated.
But because of the relaxation in rules, it became much easier for S&L institutions to engage in risky activities. For instance, S&L institutions were now able to pay above-market interest rates on deposits, which attracted a flood of savers. Besides paying high interest on deposits, another risky thing the S&L institutions did was to make questionable loans in areas outside of residential lending. For perspective, the percentage of S&L institutions’ total assets that were in mortgage loans fell from 78% in 1981 to just 56% by 1986.
Ultimately, the risks that the S&L institutions had taken on, as a group, were too high. As a result, many of them collapsed.
Learning from the past
Hingham Institution of Savings is a 189-year-old bank headquartered in Massachusetts, USA. Its current CEO, Robert Gaughen Jr, assumed control in the middle of 1993. Since then, the bank has been profitable every single year. From 1994 (the first full-year where the bank was led by Robert Gaughen Jr) to 2022, Hingham’s average return on equity (ROE) was a respectable 14.2%, and the lowest ROE achieved was 8.4% (in 2007). There are two things worth noting about the 1994-2022 timeframe in relation to Hingham:
- The bank had – and still has – heavy exposure to residential-related real estate lending.
- The period covers the 2008-09 Great Financial Crisis. During the crisis, many American banks suffered financially and US house prices crashed. For perspective, the US banking industry had ROEs of 7.8%, 0.7%, and -0.7% in 2007, 2008, and 2009, while Hingham’s ROEs were higher – at times materially so – at 8.4%, 11.1%, and 12.8%.
Hingham’s most recent annual shareholder’s meeting was held in April 2022. During the meeting, its president and chief operating officer, Patrick Gaughen, shared an important lesson that banks should learn from the S&L crisis (emphasis is mine):
“We spent some time talking in the past about why bankers have misunderstandings about the S&L crisis in the ’80s, with respect to how a lot of those banks failed. And that was in periods when rates were rising, there were a lot of S&Ls that looked for assets that had yields that would offset the rising price of their liabilities, and those assets had risks that the S&Ls did not appreciate. Rather than accepting tighter margins through those periods where there were flatter curves, they resisted. They tried to protect those profits. And in doing so, they put assets on the balance sheet that when your capital’s levered 10x or 11x or 12x or 13x to 1 — they put assets on the balance sheet that went under.”
In other words, the S&L institutions failed because they wanted to protect their profits at a time when their cost of deposits were high as a result of rising interest rates. And they tried to protect their profits by investing in risky assets to chase higher returns, a move which backfired.
A better way
At Hingham’s aforementioned shareholder’s meeting, Patrick Gaughen also shared what he and his colleagues think should be the right way to manage the problem of a high cost of deposits stemming from rising interest rates (emphases are mine):
“And I think it’s important to think and maybe describe the way that I think about this is that we’re not protecting profits in any given period. We’re thinking about how to maximize returns on equity on a per share basis over a long time period, which means that there are probably periods where we earn, as I said earlier, outsized returns relative to that long-term trend. And then periods where we earn what are perfectly satisfactory returns. Looking back over history, with 1 year, 2 years exceptions, double-digit returns on equity. So it’s satisfactory, but it’s not 20% or 21%.
And the choices that we’ve made from a structural perspective about the business mean that we need to live with both sides of that trade as it occurs. But over the long term, there are things we can do to offset that. So the first thing we’re always focused on regardless of the level and the direction of rates is establishing new relationships with strong borrowers, deepening the relationships that we have with customers that we already have in the business. Because over time, those relationships as the shape of curve changes, those relationships are going to be the relationships that give us the opportunity to source an increasing volume of high quality assets. And those are the relationships that are going to form the core of the noninterest-bearing deposits to allow us to earn those spreads. And so that’s true regardless of the direction of rates.”
I find the approach of Hingham’s management team to be sensible. By being willing to accept lower profits when interest rates (and thus deposit rates) are high, management is able to ensure Hingham’s longevity and maximise its long-term returns.
In our current environment, interest rates are elevated, which makes the cost of deposits expensive for banks. If you’re looking to invest in the shares of a bank right now, you may want to determine if the bank’s management team has grasped the crucial lesson from the S&L crisis of old. If there’s a bank today which fails to pay heed, they may well face failure in the road ahead.
Note: An earlier version of this article was published at The Good Investors, a personal blog run by our friends.
Our beginner’s guide to investing is finally here! Many investors took years to understand the principles inside, but you can have it all in one afternoon. If you have just started investing, download our free guide today so you can catch up quickly. Click here to download now.
Follow us on Facebook and Telegram for the latest investing news and analyses!
Disclosure: Ser Jing owns shares of Hingham Institution of Savings.
