Big European Banks Try to Block Contagion from Italian Banking Crisis (Before it Sinks them)
These big banks have every reason to try keeping Italian banks afloat.
by Don Quijones
WolfStreet.com
August 5, 2016
Europe has plenty of reasons to be worried these days, but none more so than the seemingly terminal decline of the old continent’s banking system. So fragile are Europe’s banks that they can’t even get through an ECB stress test — whose primary purpose is to restore confidence in Europe’s banking system, by ignoring two of the most insolvent national banking sectors (Greece and Portugal) as well as the main source of stress (negative interest rates) — without sparking a panicked sell-off.
Before the test, UK-based Barclays predicted that any bank found to have a core capital ratio of less than 7.5% would come under pressure. There was no shortage of candidates, including, ironically, Barclays itself, which made it through the stress scenario with a core capital ratio of just 7.3%. The bank’s shares have fallen by about 5% since Monday.
Barclays is no small-time institution; it is the UK’s second largest bank by assets and a member of the select club of global systemically important financial institutions: it’s too big to fail. So, too, is Deutsche Bank, which in the test was the 10th riskiest out of 51 on core capital and whose shares have tumbled 60% since May. Credit Suisse, another systemically important institution, has lost close to two-thirds of its market value in the last year while Italy’s Unicredit, another too-big-to-failer, has shed roughly the same amount since the start of 2016.
The Rest…HERE
