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The EU has not yet solved its banking problem

For whom is the financial crisis over? This column argues that the US response has been far more effective at reassuring investors than that in Europe. It says that stress tests have failed to trigger the needed recapitalisation and restructuring of Europe’s troubled banks. Europe’s leaders, it argues, must tackle these problems head-on.

The chaos that followed the Lehman Brothers collapse two years ago hit financial systems in the US and Europe with similar violence. But the consequences were not symmetric. Several large financial institutions disappeared in the US, partly because of stringent disclosure requirements, leading to immediate restructuring of the financial landscape. In spring 2009, public “stress tests” forced weaker banks to recapitalise, and soon the institutions at the core of the US financial system started regaining investors’ confidence, in spite of much pain still to come among smaller local banks. The US faces major economic and social challenges, but its financial crisis appears to have essentially ended more than a year ago.

By contrast, the EU collectively met the challenge with a succession of false hopes. It first seemed European banks could ride the wave of trust initiated by the US stress tests. Share prices went up, and some banks took advantage to raise significant amounts of equity – however, these were typically the stronger banks, not the damaged institutions that most needed new capital. European supervisors conducted stress tests of their own in September 2009, but these had little impact because almost none of their results were made public.

The lingering fragility of Europe’s banks became impossible to hide when the Greek fiscal crisis unfolded in early 2010. Policymakers eventually realised that their banking systems were too weak to withstand the impact of a Greek default. This is now widely acknowledged to have been a major driver of the decision to bailout the Greek state and then to establish a large funding facility for all Eurozone countries (Münchau 2010).

In a fit of decisiveness, Europe’s leaders agreed in June 2010 to disclose the results of the next round of stress tests. The data published on 23 July represented progress of sorts: the small, London-based staff that coordinated the process managed to persuade almost all 91 banks tested to publish details of their sovereign risk exposure, and Spain voluntarily provided additional transparency. Once again, at first it seemed to work, and the initial market reaction was cautiously positive. But serious flaws quickly became apparent. The numbers, left to the discretion of national authorities that could be tempted to sugar-coat the situation, were not double-checked or audited. The chosen yardstick of capital strength, “tier-one” capital, was questionable. Some underlying profit forecasts were probably overoptimistic. Apart from Spain, specific exposures to non-sovereign risks went unreported. The stress tests’ bottom line, that €3.5 billion would be enough to adequately recapitalise the system, was not plausible (Véron 2010).

Later developments further undermined confidence. On 7 September, the Wall Street Journal pointed to serious inconsistencies between the stress test results and sovereign risk exposures separately published by the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, based on data provided by the same national authorities that conducted the tests (Enrich 2010). Policymakers claimed that there were technical reasons for the discrepancies but failed to explain them in a manner that would reassure investors. A few weeks later, the multi-billion-euro public bailout of Allied Irish Banks, which had successfully passed the stress test in July, made the whole process a laughing matter.

Most importantly, the stress tests have failed to trigger the needed recapitalisation and restructuring of Europe’s problem banks. Just as in 2009, those banks that recently raised fresh equity, such as Deutsche Bank or Standard Chartered, were among the stronger rather than the weaker ones. In Germany, some state-controlled Landesbanken are universally considered unviable, but their restructuring is only advancing at a glacial pace. Jürgen Stark, an executive board member of the European Central Bank, was recently reported to have claimed that the much larger German savings banks sector was itself generally undercapitalised (Kade and Bartz 2010). In Spain, the central bank has engineered mergers among savings banks but it is not yet clear that the resulting entities are strong enough. In several countries, the authorities’ aim still appears to be to hide the bad news rather than to fix the problems.

The probable consequence of this paralysis is a substantial drag on growth, as in Japan’s “lost decade”. Moreover, in the event of further turmoil on the sovereign front, the EU could find itself confronted with the exact same banking fragility that so severely restricted policy options this spring. What is needed remains unchanged: A triage process that credibly identifies capital gaps among Europe’s most important financial institutions, and leads to adequate recapitalisation and restructuring (Posen and Véron 2009). The good news is that the creation of a European Banking Authority, due in January 2011, in principle provides a possible basis for a centralised EU-wide assessment process. But it is not enough. A solution to the EU’s banking problem would require a level of awareness and political commitment that has been sadly absent so far, especially in the largest Eurozone countries.

Editor’s note: A version of this first appeared on the websites of PIIE and Bruegel.

References

Enrich, David (2010), “Europe's Bank Stress Tests Minimized Debt Risk”, Wall Street Journal, 7 September.

Kade, Claudia and Tim Bartz (2010), “EZB-Chefvolkswirt schreibt deutsche Banken ab”, FT Deutschland, 9 September.

Münchau, Wolfgang (2010), “Why this crisis will go all the way”, Eurointelligence, 17 June.

Posen, Adam and Nicolas Véron (2009), “A Solution for Europe’s Banking Problem”, Bruegel Policy Brief 2009/03, June.

Véron, Nicolas (2010), “Europe’s Stress Tests: Only One Step Toward Banking Repair”, Eurointelligence, 28 July.