Goldman’s Special Purpose Tentacle Revealed In Europe’s Latest Bank Failure

Jon Alternative Media, Banking, Blogosphere, Economy, Market Commentary

The day that Banco Espirito Santo finally crashed and was liquidated nationalized under the weight of its countless criminal “inside the family” fund transfers, money losing loans, and off balance sheet activities, we pointed out to something amusing: the Goldman trail. Because not only was it revealed that in mid-July, two weeks before the Portuguese bank conglomerate failed, Goldman had invested several hundred million into the broken business, but that all through 2014, Goldman had done its best to drag the muppets down with it.
Recall from January 14, 2014 where Goldman said:
Buy BES: Winner at home, recovering abroad
In our view, BES is (1) optimally positioned to gain from Portugal’s banking market evolution and (2) likely to benefit from improving margins in Angola. With the stock trading at a 29% discount to peers’ 2015E P/TBV and with 28% upside to our 12m target price of 1.55, we upgrade BES to Buy.
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Positioning: Looking beyond the crisis – BES best placed
Resilience to asset quality deterioration determined banks’ ability to withstand the effects of the economic and financial crisis. Those effects, however, have their cause in macroeconomic imbalances that led Portugal to ask for financial assistance from the EU/IMF. Addressing those causes will determine the future shape of the Portuguese banking market and the relative positioning of the banks. In this context, we develop a theoretical (and severe) scenario to assess relative positioning in a deleveraging economy: under this scenario, we estimate that Portuguese banks would need to delever by a further 35 bn domestic loans (or 15%) by 2020 to partially reverse the imbalances that contributed to the crisis. This is a top-end assumption and depends heavily on the country’s future macroeconomic performance. In this negative scenario, we show that BES would be best positioned to gain from a ‘race to the bottom’. Our estimate is harsh, but we still believe that it is a good proxy for the underlying trends in the lending market. In this context, even under more benign scenarios, BES is best placed.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on 09/01/2014.