CIT Group’s Borrowers May Find No Shortage of Credit (Update2)
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By Linda Shen and Ari Levy
July 15 (Bloomberg) -- CIT Group Inc.’s plea for a second federal bailout may be undermined by a survey of 758 small firms that shows most have little trouble getting credit.
A “very low” percentage consider financing their “top business problem,” according to June data released yesterday by the National Federation of Independent Businesses. The net percentage of owners reporting loans were harder to get fell to 14 percent from 16 percent, said the NFIB.
Regulators at the Treasury, Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. are debating whether to risk more taxpayer funds, on top of the $2.33 billion granted to CIT in December, to keep the lender afloat. Standard & Poor’s said this week CIT may go bankrupt without U.S. help. New York-based CIT’s supporters point to 1 million customers who may lose funding, including about 300,000 retailers.
“Was this good money thrown away?” said Jim Barth, former chief economist at the Office of Thrift Supervision. Regulators may not offer aid if they conclude CIT’s failure isn’t a systemic threat, he said. “Sometimes in the process of destruction, you rebuild a stronger foundation,” he said.
CIT has battled cash shortages and faces $1 billion of bonds maturing next month. Standard & Poor’s said this week the company, once the biggest independent commercial lender in the U.S., may face bankruptcy without federal aid. The company has said it’s in “active discussions” with regulators and those talks continued yesterday, said Curt Ritter, a CIT spokesman. Ritter had no immediate comment on the NFIB data.
Regulatory Concern
While firms reporting finance as their top business problem doubled to 6 percent from earlier in the year, that’s below the highs of more than 35 percent set in 1982, the NFIB report said. There is “definitely no ‘freezing up’ of credit availability,” the report said.
The NFIB data are part of a monthly survey of small business conditions. The report by the NFIB, which advocates for entrepreneurs, didn’t address CIT’s situation. Small businesses typically employ fewer than 500 people, and almost 90 percent of all U.S. firms have payrolls of less than 20, according to Census Bureau data.
“CIT is most certainly too important to the retail industry to be allowed to fail, and the retail industry is too important to the economy to be placed under additional stress,” Tracy Mullin, chief executive of the National Retail Federation, said today in a letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. A CIT failure would “impact thousands of retailers” and “that cannot be allowed to happen at a time when retailers are already struggling to survive the national recession.”
‘Crippling Impact’
Kevin Burke, chief executive officer of the American Apparel & Footwear Association, said CIT’s bankruptcy could have a “crippling impact” on manufacturers.
“There is no level in the supply chain that CIT Group does not touch, from the suppliers of thread and material to the manufacturer, to the retail shelf,” Burke said today in a letter to Connecticut Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd.
Treasury officials have indicated in talks they are reluctant to deploy funds from the $700 billion bank-rescue program, and the FDIC continues to balk at debt guarantees, people familiar with matter told Bloomberg News. As of late yesterday, the Federal Reserve was considering granting permission to shift some CIT parent assets to its bank, two people said. That could boost the amount CIT is able to borrow from the Fed’s discount window, affording more time to restructure its debt.
Possible Fallout
The FDIC is concerned that standing behind CIT’s debt would put taxpayer money at risk because the company’s credit quality is worsening, people familiar with the regulator’s thinking said last week. The agency’s main mission is protecting depositors. The FDIC’s reluctance could signal CIT may be in worse shape than the public knows, said William Dunkelberg, chief economist of the National Federation of Independent Business.
CIT’s record includes eight straight quarterly losses totaling $3.4 billion after forays into subprime mortgages and student lending. Analysts are predicting losses the rest of this year, including $346 million when second-quarter results are reported on July 23, according to a survey by Bloomberg.
“Maybe the FDIC is saying we don’t want to be pushed because perhaps we’d be doing something that could lead to losses,” Barth said.
A CIT collapse “could affect huge numbers of firms -- most of whom are probably creditworthy and could go get financing from another institution,” Dunkelberg said. “Given that we’re in the 18th month of this recession, there are a lot of fragile firms out there, so this could cause a lot of firms to just close their doors.”
Bailout Rationale
Regulators probably will offer some kind of aid if they stick to the rationale used for bailouts of larger companies, Dunkelberg said.
“We can’t really let their liquidity problem cause them to be unable to take care of these customers, because the hit on the economy will be too large, so somebody will step up to the plate,” Dunkelberg said in a Bloomberg Radio interview.
Regulators tried to craft a rescue package late yesterday as CIT customers, prompted by reports of possible bankruptcy, drained $775 million from credit lines on Monday and Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
CIT fell 2 cents to $1.59 at 1:24 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading, leaving the stock down 65 percent this year to date. The company’s shares sold for more than $60 in February 2007.
Client Risk
Letting CIT fail would risk manufacturing and retail clients, the company said in internal documents obtained by Bloomberg News.
“CIT, as we’ve said before, is not systemic the way some of the other failures have been,” said Moshe Orenbuch, an analyst at Credit Suisse Group Inc., in a Bloomberg Radio interview. He said CIT wasn’t “interlocked” with the rest of the financial system. “You would feel pain across small businesses.”
Defaults on loans from participants in the Small Business Administration jumped to 3 percent of those provided in 2008 from 2.4 percent in 2007 and 1.5 percent in 2006, according to March data from the Coleman Report in La Canada, California.
CIT’s small-business unit was the fifth-biggest SBA lender in the first quarter, issuing $44.9 million in loans, the Coleman Report said. Last year, CIT was the top small-business lender at $771.4 million, according to the report, which projects CIT’s volume for this year will drop by $591.8 million.
“In the banking world, they’re not enormous,” said Todd McCracken, CEO of the National Small Business Association in an interview. “But in terms of what I would call traditional long- term loans, working capital loans to small companies, they’re a pretty significant player.” The loss of CIT could lead some small businesses to cut staff, he said.
To contact the reporters on this story: Linda Shen in New York at
lshen21@bloomberg.net; Ari Levy in San Francisco at
alevy5@bloomberg.net