Latest EU Bank Bailout Proposal Is a Dud
January 15, 2013 1 Comment
A European Commission proposal for bank rescues recently leaked to the Financial Times suggests that euro area officials may not be ready after all to break the destructive loop between banks and their sovereigns.
Why on earth was anyone surprised? Germany and its north European allies have never been willing to back a system in which they would have to accept risk for debts incurred by banks in other euro area countries. That’s unlikely to change soon.
If the commission’s proposal becomes policy, this would be terrible news for markets and the euro. The burden of supporting rotten banks will still be able to bankrupt states — see Spain, Ireland and Cyprus — and rotten states will still be able to bankrupt otherwise healthy banks — see Greece.
There has been optimism lately that European Union leaders were finally on their way to cracking this problem of structural contagion, which lies at the heart of the euro crisis. That optimism has been reflected in the falling yields on Spanish government bonds since November. At the latest EU summit in December, leaders agreed that the European Stability Mechanism, the group’s 500 billion euro ($667 billion) bailout fund, may be used to directly recapitalize banks in need once there is an effective single supervisory mechanism for the euro area in place.
Over the past few years, banks were recapitalized by their states, whether the governments involved could afford it or not. In the case of Ireland, Spain and Cyprus, this forced public debt to soar to such levels that the states themselves were either pushed or almost pushed into bailout programs. Direct bank recapitalization from a central euro area fund would bypass the state, so governments would not have to shoulder the burden from their sick banks and risk becoming insolvent themselves.
Yet what exactly EU leaders have agreed to do remains up for debate. In private, euro area officials have spoken of making a distinction between “expected” and “unexpected” bank losses, with the common bailout fund plugging the gap only for unexpected bank losses. How these two categories of bank losses might be defined or measured, if euro area leaders accept the idea at all, is unclear.
For the rest of this article, please see the original post on Bloomberg View’s Ticker.
Megan Greene is the Chief Economist at Maverick Intelligence, with a particular focus on Europe. She is also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a columnist with Bloomberg and a senior research fellow at Trinity College Dublin. The opinions expressed here are her own and do not reflect those of any employers. Ms Greene offers a strictly independent voice without a political or investment agenda.
Banks in Spain alone owe a trillion Euro. The stability fund is not up to it. You are correct in your analysis that EU leaders need to come to an agreement about central funds being used to shore up bust banks. But the real reason (I think) Germany is against it is not because it is against the interests of southern states. More than anything it wants to keep the Euro going and to keep the southern states on board. The true reason is that Germany knows it can’t afford to bail out the banks in the event of a pan-continental crash. There is a mad gavotte going on, with banks standing behind countries and countries standing behind banks, with shuffling and scuttling around the dance floor every time the problem is subjected to scrutiny. But eventually banks and countries will have to be in the same place at the same time, and Germany will look the other way, and the whole thing, sadly, will fall apart. There is too much debt and it is getting bigger.