Category: Banking Crisis

Whatever it takes to save the euro?

This interview with Athanasios Orphanides will ring a few bells in Dublin. I remember in the autumn of 2010, when the ECB in a similar fashion threatened to pull the plug on the Irish banking system, thinking that this was not a credible threat, since such action would de facto mean expelling Ireland from the Eurozone. Would an unelected bunch of central bankers really be willing to do something so political?

I can understand why Irish policymakers were not willing to test this logic at the time, even though I was very angry with them for giving in to ECB pressure not to burn the Irish banking system’s creditors, and still think they shouldn’t have done so.

One thing seems certain however. The ECB cannot have it both ways. It cannot simultaneously threaten to expel a member state from the Eurozone, and also expect us to believe that it will do “whatever it takes” to save the euro.

What investors (and, to be honest, I) have forgotten is that Draghi qualified his pledge: the ECB would do whatever it takes “within its mandate”. It isn’t clear that investors will continue to believe that “it will be enough”.

Nicolas Véron on Cyprus

This piece by Nicolas Véron is well worth a read, even though it was posted yesterday and the situation is fast-moving.

Bank guarantees: how to make matters even worse

I can’t quite believe that the EC has said this, but they apparently have. Unbelievable. Its obvious implication is that bank runs in troubled countries, if they ever happen, now risk being nation-wide, rather than limited to failing banks. Hat tip Eurointelligence, who call the statement hugely damaging, and Gavin Kostick in the comments.

Gary O’Callaghan on conveniently flexible moralising

I thought I would hoist this comment by Gary O’Callaghan onto the front page:

Karl observes in his article that Ireland’s citizens must be feeling foolish today: “After being reassured time and again that all depositors and senior bond creditors of … Anglo Irish Bank must be saved in the name of European financial stability, they find out that Europe’s leaders now believe hair-cutting depositors is fine and fair and doesn’t cause contagion.”

In a related dynamic, there appears to have been a subtle turn by many commentators (including on this site) from the “serves them right” school of economics. That School, most righteously established by LBS, argued that Irish taxpayers should carry the can for bank losses because they “should have” sought better supervision on banks. Many from the same School now appear to argue that depositors (creditors) “should have” been more careful in the Cypriot case and deserve to suffer for their stupidity. Serves ‘em right!

Of course, there is a practical limit on the burden that Cypriot taxpayers can bear in this case but such considerations never bothered the LBS School before. Do they now grant that Irish taxpayers were not fully “to blame” (and that burden-sharing from bondholders was warranted)?

Would they now agree with Karl that “the moral grounds for a retrospective compensation deal for Ireland have increased substantially with this new development?”

The problem with theorizing from morals, of course, is that the ground can shift (and come back to meet you).

I am tempted to add that if we ask “cui bono”, there may be less inconsistency here than at first glance meets the eye.

Solvent countries are all alike; every insolvent country is insolvent in its own way

You leave the computer switched off during the holiday weekend, and look what the Eurozone does while you’re away! I guess we don’t know yet what the final outcome is going to be in Cyprus, and I fully share Sharon Bowles’ hopes that we haven’t seen the final word yet.

But if small depositors are going to take a hit, then, as a reminder of what we will have lost, here is a handy set of links to various EU documents and regulations regarding banking deposits. This citizen’s summary which reflects the media reports of the time helps explain why people have persisted in leaving their money in peripheral European banks for so long. It seems mad to tear this guarantee up on the grounds that Cyprus is sui generis, since as Tolstoy (almost) said…

Update: Tuesday morning, and we still don’t know what is going to happen; maybe the guarantee for savings of less than €100,000 will be honoured. But I fear that Karl and the many other commentators weighing in on the issue this morning are right, and that the long run reputation of the EU’s claim to guarantee such deposits will suffer a big hit as a result of this debacle, no matter what ultimately happens.