The Ticking Time Bomb That Are The Spanish Cajas

"Even with Spain's Cajas, or savings banks, completing the country's most aggressive sector restructuring in history, after nearly 90%, or 39 out of 45 merged or participated in some form of "cold fusion" and benefiting from the financial assistance of the Spanish central bank, there has been precious little written about the actual holdings of this most aggressive lender of mortgage to Spain's 20% unemployed population. Until today: a new report by CreditSights' David Watts indicates that investor worries about the Spanish banking system are very well founded and likely underestimate just how bad the true situation actually is. In "Spanish RMBS: Insider Caja Loan Books", Watts concludes that the Cajas are likely hiding losses on home loans by taking non-performing mortgages out of securitized pools. Absent this unsymmetrical onboarding of risk, the overall deterioration of the broader pool would have become ineligible as collateral in ECB refi operations. In essence, Watts says, "by buying the loans out of the mortgage pool, the cajas would be taking those weaker loans onto their own books." This implies that the 3.7% serious delinquency rate reported by the cajas is in reality far higher, and likely "underestimates their potential losses." And what's worst: as ever more delinquencies mount courtesy of austerity, and the Cajas run out of cash to constantly buy up the weakest performing loans, all of Spain is about to lose ECB collateral access to its hundreds of billions in securitized RMBS, completely locking the country out of any access to liquidity, even that of the ultimate backstop, the European Central Bank. "