The woes of the small New York lender aren’t a red flag for commercial property, but its share price collapse can still hurt peers.
Paul J. Davies is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering banking and finance. Previously, he was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.
Caution: Share prices falling.
Photographer: Bing Guan/BloombergNew York Community Bancorp Inc. is being touted as a canary in the coalmine for a dangerous crisis in commercial property lending. It isn’t really — but its problems still pose a hazard for regional rivals because of how falling stock prices hurt banks and how investors often bail out of the sector at small signs of trouble.
NYCB’s woes stem more from the regulatory costs and challenges of leaping up a league in banking size than a sudden deterioration in the valuations of US offices and apartment blocks, which have been deteriorating for more than 15 months already.