Bank Analyst Explains How We Should Think About Wall Street’s Exposure To The Oil Crash
Today the financial sector particularly big banks was hit hard. In fact it was the worst performing sector, even worse than oil and gas. You hear a lot of talk about how crude oil production will continue to climb in the first half of 2015 because so many companies have hedged their exposure to falling prices. It’s starting to remind me of the black swan events of 2008. Just who are the counter parties to these loans. We started calling around to some of the smaller E&P companies to find out who those counter parties were. Guess what, its the big banks with the exception of Shell and BP. I don’t know if the bank analyst is counting all the counter party risk in his numbers below.
JULIA LA ROCHE
DEC. 3, 2014, 3:54 PM 2,910 6
Oil prices have been crashing for the last few months.
When prices get too low, drilling projects become unprofitable, which means companies will struggle to meet their expenses. This includes the interest expenses on their outstanding debt.
There has been some concern about the lending exposure banks might have on their balance sheets that could be impacted by falling oil prices. Should these obligations go bad, the banks would have to eat some losses.