My Investing Muse

The smaller banks carry a bigger Commercial real estate (CRE) burden. Is the risk with only the smaller banks or is this a bigger concern across the banking & financial industry? This is a recent  extract  from Factset. A tale of two bank industries. Banks hold the majority of CRE mortgages by volume, with 61% of total CRE debt residing on their balance sheets (excluding multifamily). Within the industry, however, there is a dichotomy between large and small banks. As shown in Figure 15, CRE accounts for 24% of total industry loans outstanding, but CRE represents just 13% of total loans at large banks, while accounting for 44% at small banks. Figure 16 shows this at the individual bank level; the list of banks with the highest CRE/Total Loans ratios is dominated by small- and mid-sized banks.   As per the above, the smaller banks have a much higher exposure to CRE compared to the large banks like JP Morgan, Citibank, Bank of America & Wells Fargo (which I refer to...

Global hunger   Source: https://www.actionagainsthunger.org/world-hunger-facts-statistics What could have led to this food crisis that we faced right now?  Let us take first take a look at World bank's Food Security update on 29 July 2022. (Souce:  https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/agriculture/brief/food-security-update ) July 29, 2022 – Record high food prices have triggered a global crisis that will drive millions more into extreme poverty, magnifying hunger and malnutrition, while threatening to erase hard-won gains in development. The war in Ukraine, supply chain disruptions, and the continued economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic are reversing years of development gains and pushing food prices to all-time highs. Rising food prices have a greater impact on people in low- and middle-income countries, since they spend a larger share of their income on food than people in high-income countries. This brief looks at rising food insecurity and World Bank response...