Category: Banking Crisis

NAMA CEO Brendan McDonagh appeared today before the Oireachtas Committee on Finance and Public Service. Here‘s a copy of his opening statement. Normally, when there are important Oireachtas committee meetings, I usually have to wait for the transcript to go up on the website. However, thanks to the tireless work of our friend Jagdip Singh, you can get a lot of information on what happened today here and here as well as lots of excellent questions.

One statement from McDonagh that got a lot of attention today was that, of the loans in the first tranche, only one-third are paying interest. I wasn’t too surprised about this because it tallys well with information from the annual reports released by Anglo, AIB and Bank of Ireland.

As I noted earlier in comments, the amounts going in to NAMA from these banks in terms of initial face value are as follows: €36 billion from Anglo, €23 billion from AIB and €12 billion from BoI. That’s a total of €71 billion.

All three banks have released detailed analyses of the loans going into NAMA (here, here and here). From these, we know that €6.6 billion of Anglo’s NAMA-bound loans are neither past due or impaired while the figure for AIB is €10.4 billion and for BoI is €5.4 billion. Add them up and we get that, according to the banks own figures, only $22.4 billion of these loans are performing.

So, according to the figures released by the banks, of the original €71 billion in loans made, only €22.4 billion or 31.5% are currently performing.

One can also point out that if the discounts from face value of 50% for Anglo, 43% for AIB and 35% for BoI are applied across the board to the rest of the tranches, then NAMA will pay €18 billion, €13 billion and €8 billion respectively for a total of €39 billion for the loans from these three banks. So, for these banks, we are paying €39 billion euros for a portfolio of loans of which only €22.4 billion are ostensibly currently generating any revenue.

Our old friend Donal O’Mahony from Davy’s returns to defend NAMA in today’s Irish Times and he’s on form.

The article starts with some reasonable observations:

IT HAS proved a prolonged and at times frustrating gestation period, but the policy prescription to stabilise the Irish banking system and help kick-start credit creation has finally reached its implementation stage. Nama’s journey has been an understandably arduous one, confronted as it has been by a welter of legislative, regulatory and, not least, administrative needs.

Fair enough. However, one doesn’t get any sense from this article that there was an alternative to the slow and tedious procedures surrounding The World’s Slowest Recap^TM. The delays, it seems, are simply something that must be endured.