The financial press hasn’t yet let go of the Bear Stearns meme, and most of what we read in this area tends to make our eyes roll into the back of our heads — but this piece over at Minyanville does a good job making a case for why the i-banks aren’t out of the woods yet over this mortgage thing. Let’s play name the bank:
Without naming names quite yet, what would you think of a company that accomplished the following in 2007?
- Wrote down book value from $39 billion to $32 billion or from $41.35 to $29.34 per share.
- Increased shares outstanding from 868 million to 939 million.
- Increased Treasury Stock from 351 million to 418 million.
- Increased long-term borrowings from $147 billion to $201 billion.
- Increased preferred stock issuance from $3.1 to $4.4 billion.
- Increased Total debt to common equity to 2816.81%.
Two thousand percent? Is that even a number? Yikes. You’ll have to read the story to figure out who the bank is. But the numbers certainly caught our eye.
