THE roll-call seems pretty impressive.
Spain’s largest bank, Santander, set the ball rolling last month when it unexpectedly unveiled a deeply discounted 7.2 billion euros rights issue, designed to boost its tier-one capital from 6.3 per cent to 7 per cent.
It was quickly followed by Britain’s third largest bank, Standard Chartered Bank, which raised 1.8 billion pounds from its shareholders including Temasek Holdings which holds a 19 per cent stake in it.
Australia’s oldest bank, Westpac, then followed suit with a A$2.5 billion share placement, only weeks after saying that financial vitals were fine.
Now it is the turn of Singapore’s DBS Group Holdings to raise S$4 billion from shareholders to boost its capital base as well.
It leaves many investors to wonder how many more financial institutions are queuing up to get more funds from their shareholders.
Bets have been made on HSBC Holdings which had fallen 12.3 per cent in the past two weeks on fears that it would also join the fund-raising party.
Although it is a bank with deep roots in Hong Kong and Singapore, it has three-quarters of its loan books in blighted markets like the United States and Britain.
Any rights issue it makes will dwarf the current spate of cash calls made by other banks.
But this rash of cash-calls by banks raises an important issue. Bank shares form an integral part of many institutional funds’ portfolios. But in the current cash-strapped environment, will the fund managers have sufficient funds to subscribe to all of the rights issues that crop up?
And fund managers have plenty of funding worries already – like facing the huge spate of redemption calls by investors who are unhappy with their performances this year.
You can almost expect bank shares to weaken further, going forward.
Fund managers will rather switch out of them, rather than cough up more money to ensure that their shareholdings will not be diluted.