It’s a Lot Worse Than It Looks — Part II

Last week the FDI-can’t-C declared that banks in the United States lost $26.2 billion in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Now it appears as though the actual loss figure is most likely twice that.

Our esteemed friends at Institutional Risk Analytics point out that the FDI-can’t-C neglected to included some notable loss figures in its $26.2 billion. Namely, the number does not include losses from:

* Wachovia; and
* WaMu.

Oh, those two banks! Forgot about those!

It appears that the quarterly and yearend figures do not reflect results from Wachovia Bank, because of the timing of the takeover by Wells Fargo & Co. “Under purchase accounting rules used by our favorite bank regulatory agency, the earnings clock gets reset, or so we are led to believe, thus Q4 only includes one day of operations (a $200,000 loss) for Wachovia,” IRA writes.

IRA says Wachovia would have added another $2 billion of real losses and $23 billion in writedowns for goodwill in the quarter. So, for those of you keeping score at home, we are at $51.2 billion of losses.

Now, WaMu. WaMu also reportedly enjoyed some favroable accounting treatment last year. Like Wachovia Bank, the losses of WaMu were not included in the FDI-can’t-C’s full-year numbers. WaMu lost $3.2 billion in the second quarter of 2008, and most likely turned in a bigger number in the third quarter. Let’s go with double that, just for argument’s sake.

So while the FDI-can’t-C claims that banks earned $16.1 billion in 2008, the more likely number is loss for the year. IRA dutifully points out that the banking industry hasn’t lost money for a full year since 1987. Time flies when you’re having fun, it seems.

Together, if we’re right about the above, WB and WM would have significantly changed the full year results for the industry. Instead of income of $16.1b, the US banking industry would have lost a least $8 billion. The last time the industry lost money for the full year was 1987.