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Monday, January 18, 2016

Those lower gas prices will bite you (long post)

Take a look at the two sections below from two different sources. This could get very ugly .... and quickly. Cheap gas is great but it costs a lot more to get the oil out of the ground than the current market plus now Iran can begin selling oil with the sanctions lifted. The Saudis can still make money at $30.00 oil but some other foreign producers are also pumping at a loss. Something has to give. I have seen numbers as high as hundreds of thousands of job losses in this country.
As you will see below, this could blow up on the banks as well with all the loans to oil companies out there. The small producers are dying. When oil was $100.00 per barrel they were rolling in cash but now the party is over. Bad for all of us. To make matters worse (as you will see in the last article) our always honest government is trying to cover it up again. Something to think about.
Ken

Wells Fargo (WFC) is sitting on more than $17 billion in loans to the oil and gas sector. The bank is setting aside $1.2 billion in reserves to cover losses because of the "continued deterioration within the energy sector."
JPMorgan Chase (JPM) is setting aside an extra $124 million to cover potential losses in its oil and gas loans. It warned that figure could rise to $750 million if oil prices unexpectedly stay at their current $30 level for the next 18 months.
"The biggest area of stress" is the oil and gas space, Marianne Lake, JPMorgan's chief financial officer, told analysts during a call on Thursday. "As the outlook for oil has weakened, we would expect to see some additional reserve build in 2016."
Citigroup (C) built up loan loss reserves in the energy space by $300 million. The bank said the move reflects its view that "oil prices are likely to remain low for a longer period of time."
If oil stays around $30 a barrel, Citi is bracing for about $600 million of energy credit losses in the first half of 2016. Citi said that figure could double to $1.2 billion if oil dropped to $25 a barrel and stayed there.

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We can now make it official, because moments ago we got confirmation from a second source who reports that according to an energy analyst who had recently met Houston funds to give his 1H16e update, one of his clients indicated that his firm was invited to a lunch attended by the Dallas Fed, which had previously instructed lenders to open up their entire loan books for Fed oversight; the Fed was shocked by with it had found in the non-public facing records. The lunch was also confirmed by employees at a reputable Swiss investment bank operating in Houston. 

This is what took place: the Dallas Fed met with the banks a week ago and effectively suspended mark-to-market on energy debts and as a result no impairments are being written down. Furthermore, as we reported earlier this week, the Fed indicated "under the table" that banks were to work with the energy companies on delivering without a markdown on worry that a backstop, or bail-in, was needed after reviewing loan losses which would exceed the current tier 1 capital tranches. 

In other words, the Fed has advised banks to cover up major energy-related losses.

Why the reason for such unprecedented measures by the Dallas Fed? Our source notes that having run the numbers, it looks like at least 18% of some banks commercial loan book are impaired, and that’s based on just applying the 3Q marks for public debt to their syndicate sums. 

In other words, the ridiculously low increase in loss provisions by the likes of Wells and JPM suggest two things: i) the real losses are vastly higher, and ii) it is the Fed's involvement that is pressuring banks to not disclose the true state of their energy "books."

Naturally, once this becomes public, the Fed risks a stampeded out of energy exposure because for the Fed to intervene in such a dramatic fashion it suggests that the US energy industry is on the verge of a subprime-like blow up.