Charles Hyle
Analyst · RBC Capital Markets
Mike, this is Chuck Hyle. I think that we've made very, very significant progress in our commercial real estate book. We've said for a long time that the really difficult part of that portfolio has been residential, commercial real estate. We took action very early, well over two and a half years ago to manage that portfolio down. We took our lumps early. It was a sector that we felt was going to get worse, and it wasn't going to recover for a very long time. And I think that has been a pretty good prediction. And so we've worked that number down quite dramatically. So that has really helped us I think in more recent quarters. And I think the remainder of our commercial real estate book, which is more standard in terms of multifamily, office, et cetera, et cetera has performed relatively well. And that's all cash flow-based. And as that portfolio has been completed and stabilized, I think that has helped our numbers pretty well as well. If you look at some of our other leading indicators, we've got a slide in, I think it's number 23, in terms of the direction of our criticized assets, they’ve come down quite dramatically over the last three quarters in 13%, 15%, 16% sort of number each quarter and classified to follow the similar trend line. So if you look at all of our credit statistics, they have moved very much in the right direction and to some degree in the fourth quarter accelerated, particularly in December. I think the only slight blip in those numbers is the 90-plus delinquency numbers, which was really a bit of an aberration. We had a couple of transactions, syndicated deals that with the holidays couldn't quite get over the finish line, in terms of renegotiation, so they pitched up on the 90-plus scale, but they're accruing loans and they have cleared in terms of renegotiation in the first couple of weeks of the quarter. So that blip has gone away as well. So all the directional stuff, as Jeff indicated and Henry indicated, is moving very well in the right direction.