Yesterday's announcement by St George Bank of a decision to scrap one planned capital raising and substitute it with one $300 million larger is being portrayed by the bank as business as usual, albeit a decision that is also opportunistic in circumstances in which new business volumes are favouring the five major banks more than normal.A debate emerged in the first week of September, spurred on by analysis published by Deutsche Bank, whether St George may be short on capital.The bank announced plans in late October for an underwritten divided reinvestment plan expected to raise $458 million and a non-innovative tier one issue expected to raise $400 million.That morphed into a debate over whether St George received special treatment from APRA in working out minimum capital ratios. The regulator allowed St George to count capital to be reinvested through the DRP as capital as at September 30, something denied ANZ, which had surprised the market a week before with its own plan to underwrite the DRP.The effect of the revised plan - for an institutional bookbuild to sell approximately $750 million of shares - is that St George will raise about $350 million more in capital than it planned two weeks ago. The bank estimates it will then have around $550 million in excess capital to fund asset growth.St George said it recorded risk weighted asset growth of $1.2 billion in October 2007 for growth annualised at "in excess of 20 per cent" - notionally more like 25 per cent, though that may exaggerate rounding errors.One management line is that the bank has always run skinny capital ratios and churned out franked dividends and, having paid the capital out, the bank has to regularly ask for it back to fund growth.The new shares will be equal to about four per cent of issued shares though not, management said, dilutive - so perhaps the bank's internal forecasts for cash profit growth are already higher than they were three weeks ago. The bank reinforced profit guidance of growth in earnings per share of 10 per cent in the year to September 2008.The Herald Sun reported that the St George placement will be offered at a discount of up to $4 to yesterday's closing price of $38.20.Existing sceptics among sell-side analysts on St George remain. ABN Amro, which overnight published an EPS growth estimate of 9.6 per cent refreshed its view of St George as "the least preferred in the sector".ABN Amro and Deutsche also published reports that speculated on the bank's need to raise further capital this financial year or next and implicitly questioned the sustainability of the bank's dividend payout policy.Another factor affecting St George is its inability (or to a lesser extent unwillingness at current pricing) to undertake wholesale financing through the securitisation of residential loans and which would offer minor capital relief. While there's no clear steer from the bank on the likely timing of a future sale of mortgage-backed securities, next year seems much more likely than any