Indymac today issued the following letter to its stakeholders:
Dear Indymac Stakeholders:
In this very difficult and challenging environment, any of the actions
that we take to keep Indymac safe and sound unfortunately have negative
consequences to some important constituency. As we stated in our
financial update on May 12, 2008, we have been working with our
investment bankers to raise additional capital. To-date, we have not
been successful with these efforts, and, while we will continue these
efforts with our bankers and others, we don’t
expect to be able to raise capital until there is more stability and
less uncertainty in the housing and mortgage markets. While some
shareholders may believe it is in their best interests that we not raise
capital right now given the significant dilution that it would cause,
there are consequences of not being able to raise more capital and,
therefore, actions that we now must take.
Given the continued downward trend in home prices and a resulting
increase in our forecasted credit losses and the related downward trend
in the pricing of all mortgage related assets in the capital markets,
especially mortgage-backed securities where we have experienced
significant rating agency downgrades this quarter, we expect our loss
for the second quarter to be larger than Q108, but it is difficult at
this time to be more precise given the significant uncertainty
surrounding accounting estimates, fair value accounting and other
accounting matters.
In light of the current environment and related deterioration of our
financial position since last quarter, we have been working closely with
our federal banking regulators with respect to the actions that they and
we must take to meet our mutual goal of keeping Indymac safe and sound
through this crisis period. In that respect, based on information we
have provided to our regulators, they have advised us that we are no
longer “well capitalized”,
which we stated on May 12 was a possible scenario. Our regulators have
also asked us to submit to them a new business plan for their review and
approval, something on which we have been working with them for some
time. We have agreed on the basic elements of the plan, and the
regulators have directed us to begin executing on it. An important
element of our plan is to improve our capital ratios. Without an
external capital raise, the traditional way to improve safety and
soundness is to sell assets and shrink the balance sheet, which in
normal times generally has the effect of improving capital ratios and
bolstering liquidity. Yet in this environment, where either there are no
bids for most of IMB’s mortgage loans and
securities or the bid/ask spreads are abnormally wide, “fire-selling”
assets would actually deplete capital further. As a result, the most
realistic and cost-effective way to shrink both our balance sheet and
our servicing rights asset (which, as discussed in previous
communications, is up against the regulatory cap limit), is to curtail
most new loan production.
In addition to needing to shrink our assets to improve our capital
ratios, we also need to do so to ensure that we maintain prudent
operating liquidity. A consequence of falling below well-capitalized is
that we are no longer permitted to accept new brokered deposits or renew
or roll over existing ones, unless we get a waiver from the FDIC. While
we have submitted a waiver application, it is uncertain as to whether
such a waiver will be granted.
As a result of the above, we have made the difficult decision, effective
July 7, 2008, that we will no longer accept any new loan submissions or
rate locks in our retail and wholesale forward mortgage lending
channels, except for our servicing retention channel. We plan to honor
all of our existing rate-locked loans and will continue to fund these
loans in the coming weeks. While the managers and employees in these
units have worked incredibly hard, these units are not currently
profitable due to the continuing erosion of the housing and mortgage
markets.