There are worse banks. For example, Regions Financial quietly slid into positive tangible common equity with the $900M offering last week (for the past few years it was actually negative ...)
The footnotes to the company’s latest financial statements tell the story.
There, the Birmingham, Alabama-based lender disclosed that the loans on its books
were worth $8.1 billion less than what its balance sheet said, as of Dec. 31. By
comparison, the company’s tangible common equity, a bare-bones measure of net worth,
was $7.6 billion.
So if it weren’t for the inflated loan values, Regions’ tangible common equity would
have been less than zero, with liabilities exceeding hard assets.
EDIT: fixed formatting -- I wish that there were a way to indicate that a quoted block should be wrapped
Bloomberg had a reasonably coherent discussion: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-15/stress-tests-pass-f...
FTA:
EDIT: fixed formatting -- I wish that there were a way to indicate that a quoted block should be wrapped