Joye: Banks will need more capital yet

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From Chris Joye:

While APRA’s decision to set the CCCB at 0 per cent might seem generous in light of Australia’s record house price-to-income and housing debt-to-income ratios, its macro-prudential constraints have cooled conditions.

It also likely expects that the publication of the Basel 3 capital standards in the first quarter of 2016 will compel the majors into more capital raising.

On the question of whether the majors are done and dusted on capital raising, investors need go no further than CBA’s chief credit strategist, Scott Rundell, and CBA’s head of fixed-income strategy, Adam Donaldson, who on Thursday published a report arguing the big four are short $32 billion of CET1 capital.

“Capitalisation [is] likely to be a source of credit strength for banks as they build toward meeting APRA’s expected ‘unquestionably strong’ capital requirements,” Rundell and Donaldson said. The authors reiterated previous analysis that suggested the majors’ target CET1 ratios will settle at “around 10 per cent to 10.5 per cent”, which “would put the majors at the bottom of the top quartile” of global competitors.

Let’s hope so.

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.