I've been writing about financial institutions starved for more capital. So far they have gone to Sovereign Wealth Funds, which are now severely underwater and may have stepped away from the table permanently.
Note in Lehman’s (LEH) recent capital raise, folks like Putnam stepped up to ‘defend its position’. I'm fairly certain it'll rue the day it made that purchase. Then, we had the Bond King at PIMCO say he would buy anything under the ‘Fed Umbrella’, whatever that is. After all, the Fed’s balance sheet is just as impaired as anyone’s. Using its alphabet soup of repo and term facilities, the Fed has jettisoned over $300 billion of Treasuries in exchange for esoteric garbage from banks and brokers. So, as the ‘lender of last resort', the Fed is close to tapped out...
And now you become desperate. Just ask Fifth Third Bancorp (FITB), a bank I've talked about often. Fifth Third, along with National City (NCC) and KeyCorp (KEY) have the same, decimated business models. They're based in the Rust belt, where manufacturing jobs are losing ground by the day. To come to market with a preferred offering, if I had to take a guess, it would need to be 10+%. FITB announced that it's slashing the dividend and will attempt to sell $2 billion in convertible preferred shares with a yield in the 8.5% along with some nasty dilution for current equity owners. This is a disastrous turn of events, but one that was inevitable. Welcome to desperation station. "
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