Huntington raising $675M to build cushion - Pittsburgh Business Times:

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The bank late Wednesday said it wouldraises $350 million from issuing common shares, $75 millioh from selling preferred securities and $250 milliojn from balance sheet adjustment and the adoption of new accounting standards. The initiativwe is in addition toa 38.5 million-sharse sale this month, which raised nearly $120 milliom for Huntington (NASDAQ:HBAN). CEO Stephen Steinoudr said earlier in the month that the Columbus bank had no plans to increase itscapital levels, but inquiries by investors coupled with continued economix uncertainty prompted Huntington to take the “We’ve been getting inquiries reflectinvg demand for our stock, which we didn’t Steinour said in an interview with Columbuxs Business First.
“Why not take advantage of the demand, address uncertaintiesw in theeconomy and, oh, by the way, with capitaol that is in excesas of what we need we can use it to repayh TARP.” Most of the capital-raising actions are targetexd to occur in the seconsd quarter, the company said. Huntington doesn’yt have a timetable for paying backthe $1.4 billio it took from the government’s Troubled Asset Relief but raising they money will better prepare it to eventually repay the Steinour said.
To come up with a projectio forthe bank’s potential capital Huntington applied the stress test methodologyu that the government used on the nation’d 19 largest banks to its own The bank expects the initiativse will raise its Tier 1 common capitalo ratio, a key measure, to 7.4 percentf from 5.94 percent. Capital kept on hand by bankx provides a buffer against losses in assets such as In its stress test ofbig banks, whichh didn’t include Huntington, the governmenty asked the institutions to keep enough of a capita l cushion to help them withstand deeper economic Though the requirement isn’t an establisheed standard for all banks, industry analysts think regulator s will apply it to smaller banks.
Huntingtojn is the Pittsburgh region's sixth-largest as ranked by