John Allison
Analyst · Hovde Group. Please go ahead
Thank you, Donna. I thank all of you for your report. Very, very interesting. Good afternoon. We wish you all good health and we wish recovery for our country. Special thanks to our PPP team, our lending team. They've taken the bull by the horns, they didn't back up, they never quit.I watched Kevin go through some rough times there as we worked with SBA. He didn't panic, he just kept pushing forward. I'm very proud of this exceptional group of people and I thought it was about 25% of our team working on PPP, but I now find out it's almost a third of our people. And many of these people had never worked on the loan side before and they just jumped in to help because they understand the importance. Really banks are really doing an amazing job and our team did very well at that.The good thing about community banks is we know our customers. I was watching TV and a lady called into a major bank trying to find out some information. She couldn't remember exactly the name of her loan officer. She didn't have a relationship, and that's what community banking means. And I think it would be interesting when this is over to see how much money was put out by community banks.Speaking of teamwork, it's really wonderful to see the Fed, the Treasury, which is headed by a businessman just thought I'd throw that in. The State Bank department, SBA and even Congress working together for the benefit of our economy. The Republican Senate has led and the Democratic House has reluctantly followed. But after we got the Kennedy Center funded, that was really important to get that done, we got cooperation from the – and let me also say we got PBS funding too. So that was another pause.Once we got the cooperation from the Democrats, as very needy American businesspeople stood by the sign and watched the sideshow, regardless of how it happened, the program appears to be a huge success. So successful, we need to reload the funds because we're running out of money, and I heard today we may have already run out of money. Kevin's team, as he said earlier, pretty amazing. In about 13 days, 5,500 loans and over $875 million. And they're still coming in.Let's go to the quarter. The first quarter of 2020 will certainly go down as one of the most bizarre quarters in history. It certainly is the strangest in my 50-year business career. Actually, 2018, 2019 and the first quarter of 2020 will make you wonder what could possibly happen now. In 2018, the fed nearly blew up the entire country with the consistent and foolish rate increases ever recorded.The only rational explanation is that they needed dry powder in the event of a downturn in the economy or maybe a pandemic. They said then ha-ha, but. Then they continued on with their statements that there were going to be two more increases in 2019 after tilting the country toward a recession that they had then revised the statement to a pause. And ext was two reductions of 25 basis points each that was done to prevent a recession. And then here comes 2020, and you know the story though.Let me say that 2018 and 2019 and the first quarter of 2020 have certainly been a cram course on asset liability management. Add to that the confusion of the new clown act in town called CECL. These overeducated fools have turned a process into an expensive and a complicated fiasco. I have become a believer that if it can happen, it will happen. It was our responsibility to take care of our employees, our customers, our shareholders and our communities that we serve. I think we've done a good job of honoring that social responsibility.Discipline has been the strength of this Company. Was it Jamie Dimon that said the hardest thing for a CEO is not to do the silly thing. He sees other CEOs do it. There are a lot of weak CEOs in this country, and they will listen to some of the countless squeaky wheel gets greased and some of their people complain once in a while and the next thing, the CEO breaks down like a double barrel shotgun and does silly stuff in the marketplace. It takes real commitment and guts to stay the course because anyone can take the wrong but easy route.At the end of the day, the weak CEO has not helped his people and he has been disloyal to his shareholders. Remember, what he used to say to us was growth, growth, growth. I told you it was not the right time. This was not the kind of growth in a market that was prudent to put our shareholders' money into. I have said that late in the cycle there were several banks chasing few deals, which led to high leverage, low rates, low returns [indiscernible]. The loan customers were totally driving the bus because most of the loan officers in that market were pretty weak.There is no right way to do the wrong thing. There is a time to hold them and a time to fold them. We chose to hold them tight. We take what the market gives us and don't push the envelope. As it has turned out, I think we've made the right decisions as tough as it was not to match the selling we saw the market. We held them and I'm damn glad we had. We did.There is no substitute for experience. I did not see this would come in, but you remember, we started building additional capital in 2019 just in case there was a downturn. Little did we know we were going to be facing a pandemic. A hurricane is not the same, as Kevin said. However, we are in hurricane mode which is the closest expense we have to a total disaster.We had two category five strikes, as Kevin said, Irma and Michael, Irma in the Florida Keys and Michael in the Panhandle. And we are following the hurricane process. That was extremely sensible for us during those disasters. We deferred those that needed the assistance for 30, 60, 90 or 180 days, provided additional financing for those who deserve financing or refinancing.And if you remember, the losses were minimal. We expect the same in this process. The insurance company here is the US Treasury. The difference today from '08 and '09 is that nobody had any money in those deals back in those days, 95% financing and 100% financing and more. It was a way of life. It was the way business were done. It was another race to the dumbest. Much harder to walk away today because our customers have millions of dollars in equity in their deals.Then in the midst of a pandemic, with thousands of people dying and hundreds of thousand people infected and Americans locked in their homes, the accounting clowns show up with a new circus called CECL. Total disregard for the mess they created and create an uncertainty in the market. The circus genie should have never been allowed to get out of the bottle. No disrespect to accountants.The problem was created by a bunch of accountants who probably have never run a business in their lives. They account for what others do. That's why they call them accountants. Now they're creating a new industry to solidify their position forever in the space of banks while creating for banks hundreds of millions of dollars of additional expenses to pay for the Barnum & Bailey act called CECL.The rational thing to do was to look at how banks maneuvered through the worst economic cycle in 80s years and reserve properly. Pretty simple, a one act of 2% reserve has been sufficient for us, while making specific allocation reserves when warranted. However, this doesn't cost much and don't create much distraction.Guess what, after all the calls, all the distraction, all the people, all the modeling, and the reserve getting hit with additional $71 million due to the unemployment for the month, our reserve came out at 2.01%. You cannot make this stuff up.Asset quality, I think our hospitality book will be fine. Maybe some will take a little time. We may refinance some of our customers, but remember that 98% of our hotel book have so much equity, it will be in a position to help finance them out of the problem if needed. Each situation is different, but we know our customers. In 2008 and 2009, as I said earlier, nobody had any equity in the deal so they could just walk. But that ship left the port a long time ago.Banks' balance sheets should be in the best shape they have ever been, and if they're not, shame on them. We had a large customer in about 2008 that came to us. It was a large loan and he but he put it on the seven year amortization and was paying 100% of what his revenue base he was coming in to pay for that loan.Really it was about three and a half, four years into that when the economic problems of 2008 took some of his rentals out of the business and he needed some help. But think about it. He had all equity in the deal. We simply put him on 10 years and never looked back. So I think equity in this situation will be extremely important and Home has lots of equity in their deals. I like our book.From a loan growth perspective, you heard Kevin's report on PPP. So short-term, it's going to be strong. I think the new Main Street Lending will be the next step and we have some people who qualify for that but didn't qualify for PPP.Buybacks, we suspended buybacks when the President made negative comments about buybacks. With the stock market hitting all-time lows, we're damned if we bought back and we're damned if we don't. With the SEC allowing these elbow rooms to determine when it's time to file the short zone without regard to the smallest shareholder appears to me they're running the small guy out of the market.A wealthy investor and someone I have a lot of respect for said that this is in, the big guys are insured. Where is the SEC? After 9/11, they prohibited shorting of financial stocks and reinstated the uptick rule. The Europeans had had the rule in effect like about a month ago, they put it in. The SEC could at least reinstate the uptick rule and protect people for just shorting companies in their infinity.Deposits, as Steven said, gets on a growth on that. Dividend, solid as we can see today. In order to bring some sanity back to the loan market, maybe we needed an adjustment in thinking. We did not need a pandemic to make it happen. But certainly bring those who won the stupid award back to reality. Our decision is to maintain conservative discipline of this company and we'll continue to pay our dividend. I suspect that not all banks are in the same strong capital position as Home is today.Couple that with the strength of the earnings power which has been best in class for years and the knowledge and the ability to recognize opportunities plus experience to know how to turn weak banks into top performers. This could be our turn again. If the recovery becomes a long U or an L, there will be many opportunities. Where there is something bad, there is something good, just find it. We may not be good at everything, but we're pretty good at picking good opportunities, and we certainly have the capital to play the game.Again, a special thanks to Davy Carter, Kevin Hester, Randy Mayor and 11 regional presidents, loan assistants plus the new recruited people that came in. Amazing accomplishment: thousands of loans, hundreds of million dollars if not $1 billion. In spite of the COVID-19 and the $95 million CECL circus we would have surprised the Street with $0.43 and almost $71 million in earnings. That's about what we've earned per quarter for the last couple of years, so solid performance continues.Before I go to questions – or we go to questions, Donna, do you have any comment? Anybody leaving find out that they wanted to say that they wished they said? I'm going to give it back to you, Donna, and you can do whatever you need to do.