Genworth Financial’s 80 percent stock plunge over the past two years has left its top brass with much to mull in plotting a future course for the insurer. Here’s a radical idea for them to chew on: Why not sell the U.S. mortgage-insurance division?
Sure, the unit is one of Genworth’s most profitable businesses, and its earnings are finally improving as delinquencies from pre-crisis policies decline. But a sale, which would require the blessing of various regulators, would help the debt-laden company raise needed cash fast. And it makes sense as rumblings of consolidation in the mortgage-insurance industry get louder.
Genworth is already just a shadow of its pre-crisis self, with a market value on Friday of $1.8 billion compared with $16 billion in 2007. Its operations are shrunken down, too, after it sold assets including blocks of life insurance policies, its European lifestyle protection insurance business and part of its Australian mortgage insurance business to help shrink its debt load…Read more at Bloomberg