Distressed Bonanza?

Like many, we mourn Bill Seidman‘s passing this week, and remember how dynamic and principled was his professional career. I saw him speak last fall at a hastily put together conference on TARP and he bluntly blamed bankers for the financial crisis. There was no shirking from his honestly.

Obviously, his passing makes me think about the RTC — and then to all the distressed investors who are waiting to pounce on bank assets reclaimed by the FDIC. There are some wild estimates out there about the number of banks that will fail over the next several quarters. One estimate put the number at 3,000 future bank failures. So far this year there have been 33.

While I am not going to speculate on the exact number of banks that will fail among the 8,500 or so institutions nationwide, I think it is fair to say that the Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s speech yesterday before the ICBA membership implied that the number of failures will not be as high as previously thought. Geithner made it clear that Treasury will do more to lend a hand to troubled smaller banks, where most of the presumed failures will come from. That distinction is important. If Treasury is going to buttress community banks as it has large banks — I won’t debate the merits of this strategy for now — then the FDIC can expect to be far less busy. Distressed investors should take note.