Sunday, August 23, 2009

More BMO and Sunday Funnies August 23, 2009

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BMO UPDATE: Credit Suisse - Expectations too bullish, BMO downgraded
BMO UPDATE: Reuters - Recession may start wearing on Canada's banks
BMO UPDATE: Canadian Press - Canadian bank earnings to hit bottom on commercial real estate loan losses

A bit more on the rumours from Dan Amoss posted yesterday about BMO's financial difficulties and potential failure (see Is the Bank of Montreal in financial trouble).

Interesting policy and regulation ruling from the Ontario Securities Commission I came across that was issued on February 23, 2009.

The OSC exempted the BMO Trust from continuous disclosure requirements.

The BMO Trust is a trust "which was established for the purpose of effecting offerings of trust securities in order to provide the bank with a cost-effective means of raising capital for Canadian bank regulatory purposes."

Not sure it it's an important tidbit in light of the rumours surrounding the Dan Amoss's announcement or not, but I am sure the average investor would be concerned anytime an organization is 'exempted' from making the regular disclosures legally required.

BMO has sought to revise two of its commercial-paper funds to avert a C$495 million writedown.

The writedowns had the potential to force BMO to withdraw support for a plan to restructure about C$33 billion in non-bank commercial paper that hadn't traded since August, 2008.

DBRS, the Canadian credit-ratings service, had downgraded notes of the Apex and Sitka trusts to junk just the day before. BMO provided about C$38.5 billion in these so-called 'backstop liquidity' credit lines for its own commercial paper funds and third-party trusts as of Oct. 31, according to its annual report.

Bloomberg, in it's article, cited that Bank of Montreal was the worst performing bank stock in Canada this year. In february the stock had fallen C$2.65, or 5.1%, the biggest decline since Oct. 29, 2001.

Finally there was this post earlier this year regarding BMO's woes by Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis when Bank of Montreal missed some margin calls.

We look forward to the week ahead to see if Amoss's BMO rumours are substantiated.

Sunday Funnies

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1 comment:

  1. Excellent work on the BMO story. Keep it coming. Thanks.

    ReplyDelete