Ethan Heisler, CFA
Senior Director, Strategy
Kroll Bond Rating Agency
805 Third Ave., 29th Floor | New York, NY 10022
T: 646-731-2364 | M: 516-359-0975
[email protected] | www.kbra.com

Has CECL Helped Or Hurt?
Large public companies adopted Current Expected Credit Loss (CECL) on January 1st. How has this accounting rule change impacted the banking industry as it contends with the economic fallout from the global pandemic? Has it been pro-cyclical as the industry complained it would be? Has it done what it was designed to do, or has COVID broken CECL? Are public-side analysts better informed or more confused? This session will cover these questions and explain why accounting rules and economics coincide in the bank world.

Ethan has been talking to bank treasurers and CFOs of large and small since the early 1980s, when he began his career on Wall Street doing overnight repo specials on the Government Trading desk at Dillon Read, & Co, with the Fed Funds rate at 21 percent and the coupon on the then-new “long bond” was 13.875 percent soon after graduating Columbia College in 1979 with a major in Philosophy. Going back to school to graduate with an MBA from NYU’s Gradual School of Business in 1988 with a degree in Finance, Ethan went to work in the Bank Analysis Department at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he covered large multinational banks during the financial crisis in the early 1990s, and also contributed to internal public policy memoranda on accounting and risk-based capital issues. After the Fed, Ethan joined Salomon Brothers in 1994 and covered both US and Yankee bank bond issuers in the Corporate Bond Research group and was regularly top-ranked in the annual surveys conducted by the magazine, Institutional Investor. Consolidated into present-day Citigroup, Ethan moved from research to the bank resource role in 2003, where he led the fixed income sales effort to cover US banks in the Agency MBS and derivatives space and also launched what quickly became a very popular, monthly newsletter addressed to bank treasurers, called The Bank Treasury Newsletter. Retiring from Citigroup in 2016, Ethan re-launched his newsletter as a paid-subscription and recently sold it to Kroll Bond Rating Agency, where he continues to publish it along with other research.