IndyMac Bancorp nearly out of capital, who's next?

IndyMac Bancorp announced today that it will be slashing 3,800 jobs and closing their forward mortgage business. On the company's corporate blog, they gave the reasons for this move. The Pasadena-based company says that it has been told by regulators that it is no longer "well-capitalized." The company says that though it understands that raising capital will prove dilutive, it has no choice at this point.

The retail and wholesale portions of its business will stop taking new loans effective immediately. The job cuts as well as the halting of the new loans are part of a strategy to try to improve its capital ratio, which has been obliterated due to the financial market turmoil and the mortgage crisis. Interestingly, IndyMac has been a company that makes loans to people who are just below the level of prime borrowers, but have better credit than those who land only subprime loans. This fits in perfectly with my post from last night where I pointed out that the mortgage mess is not contained to the subprime loans anymore.

What happened to the one-time write off for the credit crisis?

It isn't just IndyMac

The issue here is clearly not just IndyMac Bancorp. IndyMac is the one in the news right now, but you will certainly hear of others having similar problems. At this point the question isn't if there will be another, but rather it's a guessing game of who may be the next company with a big bomb to drop.

Already today analysts were making predictions that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could be a couple major companies that are in serious need of capital. Fannie and Freddie are both government sponsored enterprises, but they are both in some substantial capital raising difficulties.

IndyMac is the company that had the negative news regarding capital today, but this is an industry-wide problem that shows no signs of letting up. Any guesses as to who's next?