 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(September 2008) |
Under-capitalization refers to any situation where a business cannot acquire the funds they need. An under-capitalized business may be one that cannot afford current operational expenses due to a lack of capital, which can trigger bankruptcy, may be one that is over-exposed to risk, or may be one that is financially sound but does not have the funds required to expand to meet market demand.
Under-capitalization is often a result of improper financial planning. However, a viable business may have difficulty raising sufficient capital during an economic downturn or in a country that imposes artificial constraints on capital investment.
There are several different causes of undercapitalization, [1] including:
Accountants can structure the financials in order to minimize profit, and thus taxes. As a business grows, this approach becomes counterproductive (Van Horn 2006). Frequently, a growing business will apply for a bank loan only to find their entire accounting system under review.
A manual on collecting capital, by CPA David Levinson, states that one solid approach to assuring capital is to establish a line of credit, borrow against it, even if it is not needed, then pay back this loan. Doing this repeatedly can help a business owner expand their capital when they need to increase their credit or take out a larger loan (Levinson 1998).
A business may acquire capital through re-investment of earnings, through assuming debt or through selling equity. According to Van Horn, [2]
Undercapitalization may result from failure of a business to take advantage of these capital sources, or from inability to raise capital using any of these sources.
When a subsidiary of a corporation files for bankruptcy, there may be reason to suspect that it was deliberately undercapitalized and mismanaged for the benefit of the parent corporation. The main cause of failure may have been excessive payments to the parent for goods or services provided by the parent, or inadequate charges for goods or services provided to the parent. In effect, capital provided by other investors was channeled to the parent corporation until the subsidiary failed. These cases can be extremely difficult to prove, but the Deep Rock doctrine ensures that the parent corporation's claims are only settled after all other claims.
However, as decided in Walkovszky v. Carlton , the parent corporation is not responsible for settling claims in excess of remaining assets when an undercapitalized subsidiary fails.
In the banking industry, undercapitalization refers to having insufficient capital to cover foreseeable risks.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) classifies banks according to their risk-based capital ratio [3] [ failed verification ]:
When a bank becomes undercapitalized the FDIC issues a warning to the bank. When the number drops below 6% the FDIC can change management and force the bank to take other corrective action. When the bank becomes critically undercapitalized the FDIC declares the bank insolvent and can take over management of the bank.
The subprime mortgage crisis has shown that banks and other mortgage issuers in the US were undercapitalized, failing to ensure that they had sufficient capital or insurance to cover the risk of mortgage defaults in the event of the bursting of a housing price bubble. Since the affected institutions were important sources of capital to other industries, this triggered a global financial crisis during 2007–2008.
A country or sector of the economy may be undercapitalized in the sense that businesses in that country or sector are handicapped by lack of affordable investment funds. This can be caused by political instability, by lack of confidence in the rule of law, by constraints on foreign direct investment imposed by the government, or by other actions that discourage investment in certain industrial sectors. Examples:
Jeffry A. Frieden [4] notes that during the period of European colonialism the colonial powers encouraged investment in production of raw materials while discouraging investment in industries that would use these materials as inputs in competition with the colonial power's home industries. During the same period, independent developing countries in Latin America and other areas pursued a policy of import substitution industrialization which diverted capital from other enterprises where these countries had a comparative advantage. Although opposite in intent, both policies had the effect of creating overcapitalization in some sectors and undercapitalization in others.
A contrary view comes from the economist Robert Solow, who was awarded the Nobel prize for his work on the ways in which labor, capital and technical progress contribute to overall economic growth. Among other insights, Solow showed that undercapitalization appears to have less impact on economic growth than would be predicted by earlier economic theories.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is a United States government corporation supplying deposit insurance to depositors in American commercial banks and savings banks. The FDIC was created by the Banking Act of 1933, enacted during the Great Depression to restore trust in the American banking system. More than one-third of banks failed in the years before the FDIC's creation, and bank runs were common. The insurance limit was initially US$2,500 per ownership category, and this has been increased several times over the years. Since the enactment of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in 2010, the FDIC insures deposits in member banks up to $250,000 per ownership category. FDIC insurance is backed by the full faith and credit of the government of the United States, and according to the FDIC, "since its start in 1933 no depositor has ever lost a penny of FDIC-insured funds".
Financial services are economic services tied to finance provided by financial institutions. Financial services encompass a broad range of service sector activities, especially as concerns financial management and consumer finance.
A savings and loan association (S&L), or thrift institution, is a financial institution that specializes in accepting savings deposits and making mortgage and other loans. The terms "S&L" and "thrift" are mainly used in the United States; similar institutions in the United Kingdom, Ireland and some Commonwealth countries include building societies and trustee savings banks. They are often mutually held, meaning that the depositors and borrowers are members with voting rights, and have the ability to direct the financial and managerial goals of the organization like the members of a credit union or the policyholders of a mutual insurance company. While it is possible for an S&L to be a joint-stock company, and even publicly traded, in such instances it is no longer truly a mutual association, and depositors and borrowers no longer have membership rights and managerial control. By law, thrifts can have no more than 20 percent of their lending in commercial loans—their focus on mortgage and consumer loans makes them particularly vulnerable to housing downturns such as the deep one the U.S. experienced in 2007.
Structured finance is a sector of finance — specifically financial law — that manages leverage and risk. Strategies may involve legal and corporate restructuring, off balance sheet accounting, or the use of financial instruments.
A collateralized debt obligation (CDO) is a type of structured asset-backed security (ABS). Originally developed as instruments for the corporate debt markets, after 2002 CDOs became vehicles for refinancing mortgage-backed securities (MBS). Like other private label securities backed by assets, a CDO can be thought of as a promise to pay investors in a prescribed sequence, based on the cash flow the CDO collects from the pool of bonds or other assets it owns. Distinctively, CDO credit risk is typically assessed based on a probability of default (PD) derived from ratings on those bonds or assets.
A bailout is the provision of financial help to a corporation or country which otherwise would be on the brink of bankruptcy.
The Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) was a U.S. government-owned asset management company run by Lewis William Seidman and charged with liquidating assets, primarily real estate-related assets such as mortgage loans, that had been assets of savings and loan associations (S&Ls) declared insolvent by the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) as a consequence of the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. It also took over the insurance functions of the former Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB).
A mortgage loan or simply mortgage, in civil law jurisdictions known also as a hypothec loan, is a loan used either by purchasers of real property to raise funds to buy real estate, or by existing property owners to raise funds for any purpose while putting a lien on the property being mortgaged. The loan is "secured" on the borrower's property through a process known as mortgage origination. This means that a legal mechanism is put into place which allows the lender to take possession and sell the secured property to pay off the loan in the event the borrower defaults on the loan or otherwise fails to abide by its terms. The word mortgage is derived from a Law French term used in Britain in the Middle Ages meaning "death pledge" and refers to the pledge ending (dying) when either the obligation is fulfilled or the property is taken through foreclosure. A mortgage can also be described as "a borrower giving consideration in the form of a collateral for a benefit (loan)".
IndyMac, a contraction of Independent National Mortgage Corporation, was an American bank based in California that failed in 2008 and was seized by the United States Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).
The American subprime mortgage crisis was a multinational financial crisis that occurred between 2007 and 2010 that contributed to the 2007–2008 global financial crisis. The crisis led to a severe economic recession, with millions of people losing their jobs and many businesses going bankrupt. The U.S. government intervened with a series of measures to stabilize the financial system, including the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).
The CAMELS rating is a supervisory rating system originally developed in the U.S. to classify a bank's overall condition. It is applied to every bank and credit union in the U.S. and is also implemented outside the U.S. by various banking supervisory regulators.
A non-banking financial institution (NBFI) or non-bank financial company (NBFC) is a financial institution that is not legally a bank; it does not have a full banking license or is not supervised by a national or international banking regulatory agency. NBFC facilitate bank-related financial services, such as investment, risk pooling, contractual savings, and market brokering. Examples of these include hedge funds, insurance firms, pawn shops, cashier's check issuers, check cashing locations, payday lending, currency exchanges, and microloan organizations. Alan Greenspan has identified the role of NBFIs in strengthening an economy, as they provide "multiple alternatives to transform an economy's savings into capital investment which act as backup facilities should the primary form of intermediation fail."
A bank is a financial institution that accepts deposits from the public and creates a demand deposit while simultaneously making loans. Lending activities can be directly performed by the bank or indirectly through capital markets.
This article provides background information regarding the subprime mortgage crisis. It discusses subprime lending, foreclosures, risk types, and mechanisms through which various entities involved were affected by the crisis.
The government interventions during the subprime mortgage crisis were a response to the 2007–2009 subprime mortgage crisis and resulted in a variety of government bailouts that were implemented to stabilize the financial system during late 2007 and early 2008.
The Subprime mortgage crisis solutions debate discusses various actions and proposals by economists, government officials, journalists, and business leaders to address the subprime mortgage crisis and broader 2007–2008 financial crisis.
On March 23, 2009, the United States Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Federal Reserve, and the United States Treasury Department announced the Public–Private Investment Program for Legacy Assets. The program is designed to provide liquidity for so-called "toxic assets" on the balance sheets of financial institutions. This program is one of the initiatives coming out of the implementation of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) as implemented by the U.S. Treasury under Secretary Timothy Geithner. The major stock market indexes in the United States rallied on the day of the announcement rising by over six percent with the shares of bank stocks leading the way. As of early June 2009, the program had not been implemented yet and was considered delayed. Yet, the Legacy Securities Program implemented by the Federal Reserve has begun by fall 2009 and the Legacy Loans Program is being tested by the FDIC. The proposed size of the program has been drastically reduced relative to its proposed size when it was rolled out.
Securitization is the financial practice of pooling various types of contractual debt such as residential mortgages, commercial mortgages, auto loans or credit card debt obligations and selling their related cash flows to third party investors as securities, which may be described as bonds, pass-through securities, or collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Investors are repaid from the principal and interest cash flows collected from the underlying debt and redistributed through the capital structure of the new financing. Securities backed by mortgage receivables are called mortgage-backed securities (MBS), while those backed by other types of receivables are asset-backed securities (ABS).
Signature Bank was an American full-service commercial bank headquartered in New York City and with 40 private client offices in the states of New York, Connecticut, California, Nevada, and North Carolina. In addition to banking products, specialty national businesses provided services specific to industries such as commercial real estate, private equity, mortgage servicing, and venture banking; subsidiaries of the bank provided equipment financing and investment services. At the end of 2022, the bank had total assets of US$110.4 billion and deposits of $82.6 billion; as of 2021, it had loans of $65.25 billion.
The Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was created as a response to the financial crisis in 2007. Passed in 2010, the act contains a great number of provisions, taking over 848 pages. It targets the sectors of the financial system that were believed to be responsible for the financial crisis, including banks, mortgage lenders, and credit rating agencies. Ostensibly aimed at reducing the instability that led to the crash, the act has the power to force these institutions to reduce their risk and increase their reserve capital.
