Jack Prim
Analyst · Wedbush
Yeah, again Gil, it is a good question, but it's a combination of things. De novo activity has definitely slowed down. I would estimate that it's down 40% from what we would have seen a year ago this time. You actually got some states where it's been reported that the FDIC is not going to issue insurance for new charters, in the South East and the West. But as far as they defined it, but whatever they would consider southeast And west, they can indicate that they are not willing to issue insurance for new de novo charters. We had regulators just in some cases to say we think we got enough banks right now that they don't want to see some stabilization before they get back to approving de novo charter, so. So we think A is down and B is likely to continue to be down for some time. Attrition, again we have had a very high retention rates. We continue to have very high retention rate. We like everybody else have some banks that are on the government watch list and we pay attention to that. But frankly, there is not much you can do about it. Given all this you can remembers on of your head, if you just looked and said okay, let's look at the absolute news that it's an area, if we in this fix stage where most of your real estate problems are concentrated. If every single bank that we had in every single one of those states got closed, it was still have relatively modest impact on, I mean yeah certainly that’s good news but it was relatively modest impact compared to what would be the absolute this day scenario. So again certainly there is a bit of a headwind. I think you are right on, Gil, that the some of this initial estimates of banks closings were way overwhelmed. Again, I don’t have a crystal ball there, but in a stimulus package what is the normal forget this economic environment, normal attrition. Not attrition, but consolidation into banking industry has been year in year out its run 2% for last 5 to 7 years. Will it likely pick up with some of the bank failures? Yeah, Probably, but at the same time that that picks up you have got banks, sold their bank under that normal 2% attrition where everybody’s stock has been so depressed and priced, if they are going pull it off the market until times turn around, if I had to guess, I would guess that the shrinkage we might see for next two years might be 3% instead of 2%, but again your guess is as good as ours on that at this point.