Thrift Industry News--Down Again

The Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) released statistics on the state of the thrift industry for the second quarter of 2010 on August 25. The industry is limping along, but the signs of a disappearing industry are all over the report.

The cloud over the whole industry is that the OTS will be merged into the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) in the upcoming year. (See my post “So Long to the Savings and Loan Industry”, http://seekingalpha.com/article/214460-so-long-to-the-savings-and-loan-industry.) This, of course, is impacting decisions and affecting performance.

Two major figures stand out.

First, industry assets decreased by 15 percent from the second quarter of 2009 to the second quarter of 2010 to $931 billion from $1.1 trillion. From the second quarter of 2008 to the second quarter of 2009, industry assets fell by 27 percent from $1.51 trillion to $1.1 trillion.

Second, the number of supervised institutions declined from 792 thrifts at the end of the second quarter of 2009 to 753 at the end of the second quarter of 2010, just about a 5 percent decline. Yes, there have been thrift failures, but there has also been the constant drop in the number of thrift institutions in existence due to thrift conversions into commercial banks. This latter trend is expected to accelerate as the merger with the OCC proceeds.

One other interesting structural fact concerning the thrift industry I would like to mention. Of the 753 thrift institutions that exist, 402 of these thrifts are owned by 441 thrift holding company enterprises. These 402 thrifts have assets totaling $714 billion which represents 77 percent of all thrift assets. But, one should also note that these thrift holding companies control approximately $4.1 trillion in United States domiciled consolidated assets.

Note that at the end of the second quarter of 2009, there were 459 thrift holding companies supervised by the OTS and these institutions control $5.5 trillion in U. S. domiciled consolidated assets. The decline from this figure to the second quarter 2010 figure is over 25 percent.

Just in comparison, according to the National Credit Union Association, there are close to 7,500 credit unions in the United States, down about 250 from the same time in 2009. However, assets at these credit unions totaled almost $900 billion at the end of the first quarter of 2010, up just about 5 percent from the end of the same quarter in 2009. Total shares and deposits at credit unions rose by 6.7 percent, year-over-year, to a little over $773 billion. The credit union industry continues to grow and in many areas of the country, Philadelphia for one, major expanded credit unions are becoming a force in the local banking markets.

Overall, in the aggregate data released by the Federal Reserve, deposits at all thrift institutions, including credit unions, rose by 0.5 percent from July 2009 to July 2010. The conclusion one can draw for these numbers is that funds are leaving the OTS regulated thrift institutions to go to commercial banks and credit unions.

It is going to be very interesting to watch the credit union sector over the next several years. The interesting question here is whether or not the larger, expanding credit unions can pick up the consumer funds that are leaving savings and loans, savings banks, and commercial banks. Could the banking industry bifurcate into primarily “business” banks and “consumer” banks?

Given all the other factors that are impacting depository institutions one can safely say that the whole landscape of banking and finance is going to change dramatically over the next five to ten years.