Genworth Financial (NYSE: GNW) is up about 9% today on news that it will be implementing a plan to re-arrange the capital structure behind its US mortgage insurance units in such a manner that will basically leave the parent company with less “blow-up” risk concerning that business. This is assuming they receive regulatory approval, but this announcement surely would not have been announced had it not been floated by regulators first.
The implication for its majority-owned Canadian mortgage insurance subsidiary (TSX: MIC) is that there will be no requirement for a fire-sale of the MIC asset to raise capital for GNW.
MIC is up approximately 35% from its lows in July and August when I started to accumulate shares and GNW is up about 80% from the $5 baseline it was sitting at for the past year before this recent run-up. I guess I should have put money into GNW in addition to MIC, but I couldn’t make heads or tails out of GNW’s statements to a firm enough clarity for my own satisfaction.
At this point I am awfully curious whether GNW is still shopping around their Canadian mortgage insurance subsidiary or whether they’re just going to keep their ownership stake and collect dividend cheques. Genworth owns 57% of MIC and this represents $65.3 million in dividend income for them – 13 cents a share.