Credit Sights: "Wells Fargo is particularly vulnerable"

Excerpt:

Total home equity exposure at banks is pretty big. Amherst Securities has said commercial banks hold approximately $767 billion of the total $1.05 trillion of second mortgages outstanding, with the Big 4 holding over $400 billion alone.

But the key issue is what portion of these are at risk of writedowns. Most vulnerable are loans (or portions thereof) that are no longer backed by property. That is, the price of the underlying home has fallen below the balance on the loan. In banker shorthand: “loan-to-value” (LTV) is greater than 100%.

These are in peril because home equity loans are frequently structured with big principal payments on the back end, so even though many borrowers are currently making payments they’d need to stump up an awful lot of cash to pay off the balance. Unless housing miraculously recovers and they can sell or refinance at a price that will pay back all their debt, well, expect a spike in walk-aways…

CreditSights takes a stab at the potential writedown for the Big 4 banks and finds that Wells Fargo is particularly vulnerable.

http://blogs.reuters.com/rolfe-winkler/2010/04/08/home-equity-horror/