An early gift for Genworth shorts

Advertisement

Not sure what’s going on here:

Genworth Mortgage Insurance Australia Ltd said Westpac Banking Corp, the country’s second-biggest lender, has cancelled a sales agreement after a review of its riskier loans, a move that will hit the insurer’s 2016 earnings.

…Genworth, one of Australia’s most valuable stock listings of 2014 and now worth A$2.8 billion by market value, didn’t provide further details explaining the Westpac decision.

The Westpac contract represented 14 percent of Genworth Mortgage Insurance Australia’s gross written premiums in 2014, Genworth said. On Feb. 11, Genworth’s Australia business reported A$634.2 million ($494 million) in gross written premium for the year to Dec. 31.

It was too early to be shorting Genwoth anyway so not sure if anyone much would have benefited from this.

I wonder what WBC is going to do with its high LVR mortgage now? It’s either QBE’s LMI operation or internal. APRA would surely insist on the former given the concentration risk, in which case WBC just did QBE an enormous favour pre-float of QLMI.

Advertisement
About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.