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Europe's Banks, Slow to Restructure, Pose a Systemic Risk Today

The industry is finally raising capital, under pressure from regulators. Can it regain health without a vibrant economy?

Europe's Banks, Slow to Restructure, Pose a Systemic Risk Today
Europe's Banks, Slow to Restructure, Pose a Systemic Risk Today

当雷曼兄弟的控股崩溃时，欧洲官员在美国同行勉强隐瞒了愤怒。通过让投资银行逐步破坏，他们争辩，美国威胁要释放可能崩溃全球经济的传染。“对于世界金融体系的均衡，这是一个真正的错误，”克里斯汀拉加德，然后是法国财政部长当时说。

今天,欧洲人没有人责备但themselves for their problems. Although the crisis had its origins in the U.S. banking system, the fallout has been far greater in Europe, where the region's undercapitalized banks buckled badly and are still far from healthy. Ireland's banking failures virtually bankrupted the state; Spain needed a €100 billion ($133 billion) bailout to prop up itsCajas.或者在史诗财产崩溃之后的储蓄银行;两个美国的四大银行仍然国有化;甚至该地区的更健康的银行仍然持有欧元区的债务危机的人质。在雷曼五年后，这是欧洲银行制度，可以说是全球金融稳定的最大风险。（也可以看看 ”Ireland's Banks Take the First Step on Long Road to Recovery")


德意志银行的耆那教(上)Barclays'
Jenkins are raising capital. (Photographs by
Munshi Ahmed/Bloomberg, top, and Matthew
Lloyd/Bloomberg)

The threat reflects the sheer scale of the European system. Unlike the U.S., the region's economies rely much more on bank lending than on the capital markets to finance activity. Banking assets stand at a massive "35 trillion, or 3.3 times the European Union's gross domestic product, according to European Central Bank data. By contrast, U.S. banking assets amounted to $14.4 trillion, or 87.2 percent of GDP, at the end of March, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Although European banks have taken some steps to shrink their balance sheets and raise capital, those actions fall well short of what's needed — and pale in comparison with the strides that U.S. banks have made toward rebuilding.

"Too much emphasis has been placed on the hope of the European economy recovering and not enough on banks' tackling their individual problems," says Sergio Ermotti, chief executive officer of UBS, which has taken some of the most drastic action to downsize, to meet Switzerland's rigorous regulatory standards.

欧洲的银行自2011年以来将其资产负债表减少了2.4万亿欧元。筹集资金较慢，尽管最近由巴克莱和德意志银行举动 - 筹集了58亿英镑（91亿美元）和29.6亿欧元。，股票问题 - 建议更多的银行可能开始在这方面迈进。

“欧洲银行甚至没有成为可持续发展的一半，”苏格兰皇家银行皇家银行欧洲宏观信用研究负责人Alberto Gallo，于7月17日给客户写信。Gallo Reckons认为，该地区的银行需要在危机之后履行监管机构施加的更严格的资本和杠杆率，所以该地区的银行需要缩小2.7万亿欧元。他们还需要提高更多资本：Gallo估计13个最大的欧洲银行的资本要求在约600亿欧元。


雷曼的遗产：金融危机后5年来看看世界

重组的必要性将挑战一个努力重新获得健康的行业。据汤森路透的股票分析ARM的汤姆森路透的股权分析ARM，欧洲银行的税前盈利在同一年同期的同期升级的平均每年升至二季度的平均股平均仅为3.7％。根据Thomson Reuters DataStream的说法，许多欧洲银行股市继续折扣折扣才能折扣账面价值，而美国银行以溢价贸易。“折扣账面价值显示，投资者对银行的财务报表没有太多信心，”彼得G.彼得森国际经济研究所的彼得G. Peterson Institute研究院的研究员。

The restructuring, in turn, threatens to act as a brake on Europe's feeble economic recovery. Aggregate bank lending to nonfinancial companies in the euro area fell by 8.5 percent between its January 2009 peak and July of this year, to €4.4 trillion, according to the ECB. The vicious circle between weak banks and weak economies has been a defining feature of Europe's debt crisis, making economic recovery — and banking reform — all the harder to achieve. "Since May 2012 banks in Europe have cut lending to nonfinancial companies by €250 billion," RBS's Gallo tells亚博赞助欧冠. "This will continue as banks try to recapitalize and meet stricter regulations."（也可以看看 ”Europe Looks to Impose New Curbs on Universal Banks")

"Banks may need more capital, they may need to be safer, but they also need to operate in an economy that is competitive," UBS's Ermotti says. "The financial system can only be as strong as the economy it operates in. Capital and liquidity rules combined with the timing of implementation make it difficult for them to support the economy."

Ultimately, Europe needs a proper banking union to stabilize the industry and restore growth. By strengthening supervision, establishing a mechanism for resolving failed banks and creating a common EU financial backstop for the industry, such a union would break the link between indebted sovereigns and weak banks that is at the heart of the European crisis. But one year after EU leaders declared this as their top goal, opposition in Germany and other states is stalling progress.

EUROPE'S BANKS HAVE COME A LONG WAY from the dark days of 2008, but much of the sector's recovery to date reflects official intervention rather than efforts by the banks themselves.

After Lehman's collapse governments across Europe commited more than €1.5 trillion in guarantees and capital injections to prop up the sector. The U.K. government was left holding 84 percent of RBS and 43.4 percent of Lloyds Banking Group, which had taken over a flailing HBOS. Germany's Hypo Real Estate Holding and Franco-Belgian lender Dexia collapsed, requiring costly interventions by all three governments. The Dutch government spent €10 billion to bail out ING Group and oversaw a drastic reduction in the company's scope, including the sale of its insurance operations.

As the financial crisis transformed into the European sovereign debt crisis, the European Central Bank responded in late 2011 and early 2012 by injecting €1 trillion of liquidity into the banking system through its long-term refinancing operations. And when speculation about a euro breakup hit a fever pitch in the summer of 2012, the ECB promised to buy the debt of troubled economies through its new outright monetary transactions program. These actions calmed markets, saved the euro and stemmed a flight of bank deposits from peripheral countries, but they haven't been a panacea.

“LTRO等措施帮助欧洲banking sector, but the fact they are necessary is a function of limited confidence in the sector," says Kian Abouhossein, banking analyst at J.P. Morgan in London. "This limited confidence is down to the steps European banks did not take in 2008 — they didn't deal with their legacy assets, and they didn't raise capital in sufficient quantities."

Banks now need to make up for lost time. As it prepares to take over as Europe's chief banking supervisor next year under an overhaul of EU financial regulation, the ECB will require banks to undergo asset quality reviews. The central bank wants to make sure that lending institutions meet the EU's strict new standards for capital and leverage and aren't hiding dud assets on their books. It is determined to avoid the mistakes of two previous stress tests, conducted by the London-based European Banking Authority in 2011 and 2012, that were largely dismissed by market participants as too lenient.

"It's hard to say how much of a systemic risk is posed by the European banking sector, because there is still a lack of transparency, and that creates uncertainty," says the Peterson Institute's Veron. "There remains significant fragility in the system. We need a comprehensive public assessment of bank balance sheets."

National regulators have already begun stepping up pressure on banks to meet the new standards. Under an EU directive that implements the global banking capital standards known as Basel III, European banks must hold tier-1 capital of 7 percent of risk-weighted assets, up from 4 percent previously. In addition, banks will have to meet a new leverage ratio that requires them to hold equity capital equal to 3 percent of total assets. Banks have until 2018 to meet the target, but investors and regulators have been pushing them to do so earlier. For European banks that have used risk weightings aggressively in the past to reduce their capital needs, the introduction of a blunt tool like the leverage ratio will hit hard.

Other regulations may be looming. The so-called Vickers Commission in the U.K. has recommended that banks ring-fence their retail operations from their investment banking divisions to contain risks, while the EU's Liikanen report has called for them to separate their proprietary trading and other high-risk activities from mainstream banking operations.

银行应对更为严格的环境。On July 30, Barclays CEO Antony Jenkins bowed to pressure from regulators and announced plans for a major equity-raising exercise. The bank will raise £5.8 billion with a rights issue of new shares, sell some £2 billion worth of contingent capital securities and pare assets by as much as £80 billion, largely by shrinking its derivatives book and reducing securities financing activities. The move followed a determination by the Prudential Regulatory Authority, the arm of the Bank of England that supervises banks, that Barclays needed an additional £12.8 billion of capital to meet the new leverage ratio.（也可以看看 ”Barclays Capital's Bob Diamond: Wall Street's Would-Be King")

此外，在7月底，德国的德国银行宣布介绍加强资本比率。该银行将在未来两年将其资产负债表削减2500亿欧元，主要是净化其大衍生物的曝光率。4月份的减少，结合在4月29.6亿欧元的收益，应允许德意志达到新的杠杆统治，并实现其第1级资本比率目标为10％。银行的COO-CEO Anshu Jain表示，Deutsche的“饥饿行军”为资本结束了。（也可以看看 ”The Last Hurrah for Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann")

Swiss banks have taken more-radical steps, reflecting the Swiss National Bank's demand that Credit Suisse and UBS hold a capital cushion of 3 percent of risk-weighted assets on top of the Basel III standard of 7 percent.

UBS, which needed a government bailout in 2008 after taking write-downs of more than $50 billion on subprime mortgages and other toxic assets, has slashed its risk-weighted assets by 40 percent since September 2011, to Sf239 billion ($258 billion). It has scaled back its investment banking unit; shut a number of capital-intensive businesses, such as distressed-debt trading and sovereign bond trading; and refocused the group around wealth management and Swiss retail and commercial banking. The efforts seem to be working. In August the SNB said the stabilization fund it set up in 2008 to purchase $38.7 billion in troubled assets from UBS had repaid its loan to the central bank, allowing UBS to proceed with its plan to repurchase those once-toxic assets.

Ermotti, the fourth CEO to run the bank since the crisis erupted, says the change in strategy is profound: "Shortly after I became CEO [in September 2011], we made an assessment that despite years of investment, the investment bank had not delivered the results we were looking for. We recognized that the regulatory environment had changed for good." The bank's net income rose 32 percent in the second quarter, to Sf690 million, despite an $885 million write-off to settle charges that UBS misrepresented mortgage-backed securities it sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

自2011年以来，法国银行已经对欧元区债务问题的担忧引发了美国金钱市场资金的担忧，对今年2011年进行了大量的措施，这是法国银行纸的大买家。资金突然下降迫使法国银行减少他们的美国活动，缩小贷款，将投资银行模式从其资产负债表上持有贷款，向第三方投资者分配风险。8月1日，弗雷德里德Oudea，Societe Generale的首席执行官表示，该国的第二大贷款人当然是为了达到监管要求，而无需进一步减少资产。BNP Paribas是欧洲最强大的资本化银行之一，报告了6月底的3.4％的杠杆比率。

The real risks lie in the periphery of the euro zone and in midtier banks. The latter don't get anywhere near as much attention as the big banks but account for 67 percent of European banking assets, according to estimates by the ECB. Europe's smaller banks "are less able to raise capital, so deleveraging is the only option," says RBS's Gallo.

In June the U.K.'s Co-operative Bank acknowledged that it had to plug a £1.5 billion hole in its balance sheet. In February the Netherlands nationalized bank and insurance group SNS Reaal in a €10 billion deal after a failed attempt by private investors to rescue the bank, which has suffered heavy property loan losses. The move marked the first use of the country's Intervention Act, a law passed in 2012 to comply with EU rules requiring countries to have a legislative framework for resolving failed banks. As part of the deal, the government decided to impose losses on both shareholders and subordinated creditors through investor bail-ins. On June 18, Danske Bank said it had been ordered by the Danish Financial Supervisory Authority to change how it calculates its solvency and to set aside more risk capital. Danske, Denmark's biggest financial institution, said the order would increase its risk-weighted assets by about 100 billion Danish kroner ($17.9 billion) from the first-quarter level of Dkr797 billion. J.P. Morgan's Abouhossein says the Danish move is part of a broader trend by European regulators to apply Basel III's tougher standards in the calculation of risk-weighted assets, which he estimates will raise capital requirements on banks by about half a percentage point.

Meanwhile, the European Commission is still deciding on a restructuring plan for Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, Italy's third-largest lender, which asked for a €4 billion state bailout in 2012 following losses on derivatives transactions made in 2008–'09. "The bank will either require more public support or have to implement burden-sharing on subordinated debt," says RBS's Gallo.

In the euro zone periphery, sovereign bailouts have triggered austerity and recession, complicating the task of restoring banks to health. Spain's banks have been forced to restructure as part of a €100 billion EU rescue package agreed to in June 2012. Under the restructuring plans Bankia, the country's third-largest lender, and three other banks — Banco de Valencia, Catalunya Banc and NCG Banco, which received €37 billion of cash among them — will force losses on junior creditors by haircutting the nominal amount owed and swapping the remaining amount for equity. This burden-sharing will reduce the total amount of capital injected into the banks by the Spanish government by €10 billion, according to the European Commission.

“西班牙银行业已经开展了它所需的大部分调整，这两者都是在国有化银行和桑坦德这样的其他人那样，这根本没有得到任何支持，”首席财务官Jose Antonio Alvarez说Banco Santander。“该部门已经规定并将资本增加了相当于25％的GDP，这看起来足够了。”桑坦德在上半年收入涨幅为29％至250亿欧元，并表示其第1级资本比率在巴塞尔III规则下的9％以上。“资本可能是[该问题的最积极的领域，这可能会减轻银行围绕筹集股权的一些压力，”瑞士信贷的分析师在客户的一张笔记中表示。

The Spanish experience is evidence of the fragmented approach to banking resolution and a strong argument for completing Europe's much-discussed banking union, which would harmonize regulation and provide a common backstop to the industry. Progress is proving fitful and slow, however.

In June, EU finance ministers agreed on common rules that would force creditors to take bigger losses in cases of bank failures, but these rules won't come into force until 2018. In July the European Commission unveiled its proposal for a single resolution mechanism for winding up failed banks. The plan would involve national regulators but give the Brussels-based commission, the EU's executive agency, the power to decide when to resolve a bank. For politicians in Germany and France, allowing an EU bureaucrat to shut down a national bank is anathema, setting up a major political struggle this fall. Meanwhile, the idea of having a common backstop to provide future bailouts — a central plank of banking union when plans were first floated a year ago — has quietly been dropped in the face of opposition from a bailout-fatigued Berlin.

European banking union will be essential to restoring the industry to full health, but that is a difficult political project that will take years to achieve. Bankers, investors and regulators had best hope it doesn't take another big bank crisis to reach that goal.


雷曼的遗产：金融危机后5年来看看世界

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