Bank Of America Cuts Off Credit To Some Small Businesses
Bank of America Corp., under pressure to raise capital and cut risks, is severing lines of credit to some small-business owners who have used them to stay afloat.
The Charlotte, N.C., bank is demanding that these customers pay off their credit line balances all at once instead of making monthly payments. If they can’t pay in full, they are being offered new repayment plans for as long as five years, but with far higher interest rates than their original credit lines had.
Business owners complain that BofA’s credit squeeze is abrupt and could strain their small companies and even put them out of business. The credit cutoff is coming at a time when the California economy can’t seem to catch a break, and bucks what the financial industry says is a new trend of easing standards on business loans.
One such customer, Babak Zahabizadeh, was told in a letter that the $96,000 debt carried by his Burbank messenger service must be repaid Jan. 25. A loan officer offered multiple alternatives over the phone that Zahabizadeh called unaffordable, including paying off the debt at 12% interest over two years. That’s about $4,500 a month, nearly 10 times his current interest-only payment.
Zahabizadeh, known as Bobby Zahabi to his customers, said he has cut the staff of his Messengers & Distribution Inc. to 80 from 200 to nurse his business through tough times.
“I was like, ‘Dude, you’re calling a guy who’s barely surviving!’ ” he said. “My final word was that I can double my payment — but not triple or quadruple it. I told them if they apply too much pressure they’re going to push me into bankruptcy.”
The capped credit lines stem from a corporate overhaul launched by Brian Moynihan, who became Bank of America’s chief executive in 2010. He promised to address losses caused by loose lending and rapid expansion by reining in risks and shedding investments deemed non-core.
BofA spokesman Jefferson George said a “very small percentage” of small-business customers have been affected by the changes. He would not provide exact numbers except to say it wasn’t in the hundreds of thousands. Some of the affected businesses had been customers of other banks that Bank of America acquired, but most were BofA customers from the start, George said.
“These changes were explained in letters to customers, and they were necessary for Bank of America to continue prudent lending to viable businesses across the U.S.,” he said.
The bank still has 3.5 million non-mortgage loans to small businesses on its books. The affected business owners were notified a year in advance that their credit lines were being called, George said, although Zahabi and several others said they had not received the early warnings.
The changes also include added annual reviews of borrowers and annual fees, and often reductions in the maximum amount of credit. George said the aim was to reduce Bank of America’s risks and to bring the loan terms in line with more stringent standards imposed after the 2007 mortgage meltdown and 2008 credit crisis.
Scott Hauge, president of the advocacy group Small Business California, called the credit cuts “a tragedy” for longtime BofA clients left vulnerable by years of struggle in a sour economy.
“If small businesses are going to lead the way out of the economic doldrums we now face in this country, they must have access to capital, not only to hire more people but to protect the jobs they are currently providing,” Hauge said.
Bank of America was a leader in the banking industry’s abortive attempt to impose debit card fees. But it appears to be a laggard in tightening business lending standards. Most other banks, having tightened lending standards in the aftermath of the financial crisis, had eased credit last year as competition for small-business customers heats up, bank analysts say.
“Everyone … is targeting commercial and particularly small-business lending as the real focus area for growth,” said Joe Morford, an analyst in San Francisco for RBC Capital Markets.
While Bank of America is advertising its own commitment to small businesses, it needs to send another message to its government supervisors because it has less of a capital cushion against losses than major rivals, said FBR Capital Markets bank analyst Paul Miller.
Restricting credit lines “is a way to show the regulators they are serious about addressing risks,” Miller said. “Bank of America is under great pressure, especially with another round of [Federal Reserve] bank stress tests coming up, as the regulators say: ‘We want you to tighten up.’ ”
The analysts said all banks monitor business customers and restrict credit on a case-by-case basis. But they said they were unaware of any other large bank systematically capping credit at this time.
Customers interviewed by The Times said they could understand how the turbulent economy might result in some restrictions. But they complained that the credit cutoffs threatened to undo businesses they shepherded through the downturn by slashing costs, hoping to expand when brighter days return.
Several small-business owners indicated that they had nearly used up all the available credit on their Bank of America lines. However, George said maxing out the lines wasn’t a major factor in the bank’s reevaluation of the credit terms.
Kathleen Caid’s Antique Artistry Studio in Glendale sells elaborately beaded, Victorian-style shades that she makes for lamps, chandeliers and sconces. She said she had understood that her $85,000 credit line would remain in place “as long as I wasn’t in default,” and she hadn’t missed any payments.
Caid and her husband, Tim Melchior, a video producer with a Burbank media company, insist they are not in serious financial trouble despite having laid off her eight full-time employees and downsized her business space by two-thirds during the recession.
Yet Bank of America says that her credit-line debt, totaling $80,000, is due in May.
“I wouldn’t have run it up if I knew what was in store,” she said, adding that she would be speaking to an attorney and other banks about her options.
By: E. Scott Reckard, Los Angeles Times, Jamuary 3, 2012
Inconvenient Income Inequality
Is income inequality becoming the new global warming? In other words, is this another case where the facts of an existential threat lose traction among a weary American public as deniers attempt to reduce them to partisan opinions?
It’s beginning to seem so.
A Gallup poll released on Thursday found that, after rising rather steadily for the past two decades, the percentage of Americans who said that the country is divided into “haves” and “have-nots” took the largest drop since the question was asked.
This happened even as the percentage of Americans who grouped themselves under either label stayed relatively constant. Nearly 6 in 10 Americans still see themselves as the haves, while only about a third see themselves as the have-nots. The numbers have been in that range for a decade.
This is the new American delusion. The facts point to a very different reality.
An Associated Press report this week on census data found that “a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income.” The report said that the data “depict a middle class that’s shrinking.”
An October report from the Congressional Budget Office found that, from 1979 to 2007, the average real after-tax household income for the 1 percent of the population with the highest incomes rose 275 percent. For the rest of the top 20 percent of earners, it rose 65 percent. But it rose just 18 percent for the bottom 20 percent.
And a report released in May by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that “the gap between rich and poor in O.E.C.D. countries has reached its highest level for over 30 years.” In the United States, the average income of the richest 10 percent of the population had risen to around 14 times that of the poorest 10 percent.
Our growing income inequality is a fact. So is the possibility that it could prove economically disastrous.
An April report from the International Monetary Fund found that growing income inequality has a negative effect on economic expansion. The report said that long periods of high growth, which were called “growth spells,” were “much more likely to end in countries with less equal income distributions. The effect is large.” It continued: “Inequality seemed to make a big difference almost no matter what other variables were in the model or exactly how we defined a ‘growth spell.’ ”
Our income inequality could jeopardize our recovery.
Yet another Gallup report issued Friday found that most Americans now say that the fact that some people in the U.S. are rich and others are poor does not represent a problem but is an acceptable part of our economic system.
If denial is a river, it runs through doomed societies.
By: Charlets Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, December 16, 2011
Job Creation: Small Isn’t Always Beautiful
I challenge you to find a stump speech by a politician running for any office from dog catcher to president that doesn’t invoke the importance of small businesses.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s a hat tip to American entrepreneurialism, evoking images like that of Steve Jobs planting a seed in his garage that grew into an amazing Apple orchard. Besides, don’t most people work for small businesses, and aren’t such businesses the engine of job growth?
Actually, no. In what may be the most misunderstood fact about the job market, although most companies are small — according to 2008 census data, 61 percent are small businesses with fewer than four workers — more than two-thirds of the American work force is employed by companies with more than 100 workers. You can tweak the definitions, but even if you define “small” as fewer than 500 people (as the federal government does, basically), you still find that half the work force is employed by large businesses.
It’s even more stunning when it comes to payrolls: 57 percent of total compensation is paid out by companies of 500 or more employees, with most of that coming from the largest, those with at least 10,000 employees. And new research by the Treasury Department finds that small businesses — defined as those with income between $10,000 and $10 million, or about 99 percent of all businesses — account for just 17 percent of business income, and only 23 percent of them pay any wages at all.
But don’t small businesses at least fuel job growth? Sort of. It’s not small businesses that matter, but new businesses, which by definition create new jobs. Real job creation, though, doesn’t kick in until those small businesses survive and grow into larger operations. In fact, according to path-breaking work by the economist John C. Haltiwanger and his colleagues, once they accounted for the outsize contributions by new and young companies, they found “no systematic relationship” between net job growth and company size.
It’s unlikely such findings will change politicians’ speeches trumpeting small businesses. But if we want to get our job market back on track, they should inform our policy thinking. For example, it’s not only the case that start-ups are of particular importance to robust job growth. They’ve been creating fewer jobs over the last decade. Employment at start-ups fell by almost half, and those losses predated the “Great Recession” — probably one reason job growth was so lackluster over the last decade’s expansion.
Economists do not yet have a good answer as to why start-ups and surviving young companies are creating fewer jobs, but it may have something to do with “allocative inefficiency.” Too many resources flowed to financial engineering in the last decade, and too few went to R & D and innovation outside of the financial sector. The decline of American manufacturing plays a role here as well, as the sector has historically accounted for 70 percent of job-creating private-sector R & D, often in partnership with start-ups and small suppliers.
This isn’t to say that public policy should abandon small businesses. Many face distinctive hurdles compared with large businesses: they have tighter profit margins and thus less room for mistakes, they have diminished access to credit markets and, even with creditworthy borrowing records, many say they’re not getting the loans they need. Small manufacturers often have less access to export markets, and, with emerging economies growing a lot faster than advanced economies, that’s a big disadvantage.
Yet the sector’s primary lobbying group — the National Federation of Independent Business — tends to fight less for these pragmatic policies and more for the standard conservative agenda of lower taxes and deregulation. Indeed, the group has become a purely partisan operation, fighting more for Republican electoral victory than small-business growth. For example, it opposed the president’s jobs bill, even though independent analysts estimated it would significantly increase economic demand, and the federation’s own survey shows that “poor sales” — a k a weak demand — is a much bigger problem for its members than taxes or regulations.
The next time a politician tells you how he or she is for small business (which will likely be the next time you hear a politician say anything), be mindful that to the extent that size matters at all for job growth, it’s really about new companies that will start small and, if they survive, perhaps grow large. Everything else is largely noise — and too often, noise that has little to do with what this economy really needs.
By: Jared Bernstein, Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times, October 23, 2011
Another Inside Job: The Continuation Of Banker Bad Behavior
Count me among those who were glad to see the documentary “Inside Job” win an Oscar. The film reminded us that the financial crisis of 2008, whose aftereffects are still blighting the lives of millions of Americans, didn’t just happen — it was made possible by bad behavior on the part of bankers, regulators and, yes, economists.
What the film didn’t point out, however, is that the crisis has spawned a whole new set of abuses, many of them illegal as well as immoral. And leading political figures are, at long last, showing some outrage. Unfortunately, this outrage is directed, not at banking abuses, but at those trying to hold banks accountable for these abuses.
The immediate flashpoint is a proposed settlement between state attorneys general and the mortgage servicing industry. That settlement is a “shakedown,” says Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama. The money banks would be required to allot to mortgage modification would be “extorted,” declares The Wall Street Journal. And the bankers themselves warn that any action against them would place economic recovery at risk.
All of which goes to confirm that the rich are different from you and me: when they break the law, it’s the prosecutors who find themselves on trial.
To get an idea of what we’re talking about here, look at the complaint filed by Nevada’s attorney general against Bank of America. The complaint charges the bank with luring families into its loan-modification program — supposedly to help them keep their homes — under false pretenses; with giving false information about the program’s requirements (for example, telling them that they had to default on their mortgages before receiving a modification); with stringing families along with promises of action, then “sending foreclosure notices, scheduling auction dates, and even selling consumers’ homes while they waited for decisions”; and, in general, with exploiting the program to enrich itself at those families’ expense.
The end result, the complaint charges, was that “many Nevada consumers continued to make mortgage payments they could not afford, running through their savings, their retirement funds, or their children’s education funds. Additionally, due to Bank of America’s misleading assurances, consumers deferred short-sales and passed on other attempts to mitigate their losses. And they waited anxiously, month after month, calling Bank of America and submitting their paperwork again and again, not knowing whether or when they would lose their homes.”
Still, things like this only happen to losers who can’t keep up their mortgage payments, right? Wrong. Recently Dana Milbank, the Washington Post columnist, wrote about his own experience: a routine mortgage refinance with Citibank somehow turned into a nightmare of misquoted rates, improper interest charges, and frozen bank accounts. And all the evidence suggests that Mr. Milbank’s experience wasn’t unusual.
Notice, by the way, that we’re not talking about the business practices of fly-by-night operators; we’re talking about two of our three largest financial companies, with roughly $2 trillion each in assets. Yet politicians would have you believe that any attempt to get these abusive banking giants to make modest restitution is a “shakedown.” The only real question is whether the proposed settlement lets them off far too lightly.
What about the argument that placing any demand on the banks would endanger the recovery? There’s a lot to be said about that argument, none of it good. But let me emphasize two points.
First, the proposed settlement only calls for loan modifications that would produce a greater “net present value” than foreclosure — that is, for offering deals that are in the interest of both homeowners and investors. The outrageous truth is that in many cases banks are blocking such mutually beneficial deals, so that they can continue to extract fees. How could ending this highway robbery be bad for the economy?
Second, the biggest obstacle to recovery isn’t the financial condition of major banks, which were bailed out once and are now profiting from the widespread perception that they’ll be bailed out again if anything goes wrong. It is, instead, the overhang of household debt combined with paralysis in the housing market. Getting banks to clear up mortgage debts — instead of stringing families along to extract a few more dollars — would help, not hurt, the economy.
In the days and weeks ahead, we’ll see pro-banker politicians denounce the proposed settlement, asserting that it’s all about defending the rule of law. But what they’re actually defending is the exact opposite — a system in which only the little people have to obey the law, while the rich, and bankers especially, can cheat and defraud without consequences.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 13, 2011
How To Kill A Recovery-Republican Style
The economic news has been better lately. New claims for unemployment insurance are down; business and consumer surveys suggest solid growth. We’re still near the bottom of a very deep hole, but at least we’re climbing.
It’s too bad that so many people, mainly on the political right, want to send us sliding right back down again.
Before we get to that, let’s talk about why economic recovery has been so long in coming.
Some economists expected a rapid bounce-back once we were past the acute phase of the financial crisis — what I think of as the oh-God-we’re-all-gonna-die period — which lasted roughly from September 2008 to March 2009. But that was never in the cards. The bubble economy of the Bush years left many Americans with too much debt; once the bubble burst, consumers were forced to cut back, and it was inevitably going to take them time to repair their finances. And business investment was bound to be depressed, too. Why add to capacity when consumer demand is weak and you aren’t using the factories and office buildings you have?
The only way we could have avoided a prolonged slump would have been for government spending to take up the slack. But that didn’t happen: growth in total government spending actually slowed after the recession hit, as an underpowered federal stimulus was swamped by cuts at the state and local level.
So we’ve gone through years of high unemployment and inadequate growth. Despite the pain, however, American families have gradually improved their financial position. And in the past few months there have been signs of an emerging virtuous circle. As families have repaired their finances, they have increased their spending; as consumer demand has started to revive, businesses have become more willing to invest; and all this has led to an expanding economy, which further improves families’ financial situation.
But it’s still a fragile process, especially given the effects of rising oil and food prices. These price rises have little to do with U.S. policy; they’re mainly because of growing demand from China and other emerging markets, on one side, and disruption of supply from political turmoil and terrible weather on the other. But they’re a hit to purchasing power at an especially awkward time. And things will be much worse if the Federal Reserve and other central banks mistakenly respond to higher headline inflation by raising interest rates.
The clear and present danger to recovery, however, comes from politics — specifically, the demand from House Republicans that the government immediately slash spending on infant nutrition, disease control, clean water and more. Quite aside from their negative long-run consequences, these cuts would lead, directly and indirectly, to the elimination of hundreds of thousands of jobs — and this could short-circuit the virtuous circle of rising incomes and improving finances.
Of course, Republicans believe, or at least pretend to believe, that the direct job-destroying effects of their proposals would be more than offset by a rise in business confidence. As I like to put it, they believe that the Confidence Fairy will make everything all right.
But there’s no reason for the rest of us to share that belief. For one thing, it’s hard to see how such an obviously irresponsible plan — since when does starving the I.R.S. for funds help reduce the deficit? — can improve confidence.
Beyond that, we have a lot of evidence from other countries about the prospects for “expansionary austerity” — and that evidence is all negative. Last October, a comprehensive study by the International Monetary Fund concluded that “the idea that fiscal austerity stimulates economic activity in the short term finds little support in the data.”
And do you remember the lavish praise heaped on Britain’s conservative government, which announced harsh austerity measures after it took office last May? How’s that going? Well, business confidence did not, in fact, rise when the plan was announced; it plunged, and has yet to recover. And recent surveys suggest that confidence has fallen even further among both businesses and consumers, indicating, as one report put it, that the private sector is “unprepared to fill the hole left by public sector cuts.”
Which brings us back to the U.S. budget debate.
Over the next few weeks, House Republicans will try to blackmail the Obama administration into accepting their proposed spending cuts, using the threat of a government shutdown. They’ll claim that those cuts would be good for America in both the short term and the long term.
But the truth is exactly the reverse: Republicans have managed to come up with spending cuts that would do double duty, both undermining America’s future and threatening to abort a nascent economic recovery.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 3, 2011
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