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发表于 2012-6-30 01:39 AM
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本帖最后由 Diffusion 于 2012-6-30 01:40 编辑
According to a latest Economist's article, the proposed banking union is a mirage, not a miracle
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The euro crisis
Bankers of the euro area, unite!
Why a banking union is more problematic than many seem to assume
Jun 30th 2012 | from the print edition
PRECIOUS little is expected of European summits these days, but the one scheduled for June 28th-29th (after The Economist had gone to press) needs to show some progress in solving euro-zone woes. A breakthrough looks likeliest in banking, where senior European officials have begun talking up a union that centralises bank supervision and that also has a common pot of money to insure deposits and deal with banks that collapse. This week, for instance, a quartet of euro-area bigwigs, led by Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, published proposals for such a system.
The logic of a banking union is clear. The status quo of national bank supervision, national bank resolution and national deposit-insurance funds is not working. It has joined banks and governments at the hip, so that problems afflicting one are transmitted swiftly to the other. But politicians seem to regard banking union as an easier option than moving towards fiscal union. That assumption is mistaken.
Disburse, disperse
Banking systems in many European countries dwarf their national economies (see chart). With assets and liabilities that are several times larger than GDP, even relatively strong European economies such as France, Germany or the Netherlands might struggle to stand behind their banking systems were they to get into serious trouble, as Ireland found to its cost in 2008. A contamination of national balance-sheets by troubled banks is at the heart of the crisis in Spain, for example.
This threat also exists beyond the euro area, of course: banking liabilities in Britain, Switzerland and Denmark are four to five times larger than their national economies. Yet all three have their own central banks and can print money if pushed to.
Mr Van Rompuy’s proposed banking union could sever the dangerous link between governments and banks. The liabilities of even the largest European banks look manageable relative to the GDP of the European Union or the euro area. And a common deposit-insurance fund could also credibly reduce the risk of bank runs in vulnerable countries. Yet the obstacles to achieving a union are formidable.
The first of these is deciding its reach. Mr Van Rompuy thinks the banking union ought to cover the whole of the EU to avoid fragmenting Europe’s single market in financial services. The obvious regulator in that case would be the European Banking Authority (EBA), which currently writes rules but does little actual supervision. This is opposed by France and Germany, which think the EBA lacks credibility.
In any case, Britain is unlikely to agree to hand over day-to-day responsibility for financial services, its biggest export industry, to a European regulator. British banks are also unenthusiastic. Some have almost no direct exposure to the euro area—Standard Chartered, for instance, does most of its business in Asia, Africa and the Middle East—yet fret they may be called upon to contribute to a common fund when they have virtually no European deposits.
An alternative would be for the banking union to apply only to countries in the euro area. The European Central Bank (ECB) has already made a bid for the role of supervisor. But a euro-area banking union would risk a fragmentation of Europe’s single market that might leave Britain’s financial industry isolated. It would also raise very awkward questions for euro-zone members themselves. Banks and governments alike would struggle to give up control to a distant banking regulator that might, for instance, tell national champions to reduce their exposures to domestic housing markets or make fewer loans to small businesses in order to cut risk.
Another thorny issue would be trying to raise money for common deposit-insurance and bank-resolution funds. Simon Samuels, an analyst at Barclays, reckons that an insurance fund would have to cover EURO 11 trillion ($14 trillion) in deposits. For the industry to raise a pot worth 1.4% of assets, euro-zone banks would have to be taxed a fifth of their annual earnings for five years. Mr Samuels’s figures may be a bit rich, but even on more generous assumptions a prefunded insurance pot would still have to raise more than EURO 100 billion from an already creaking banking system over the next few years.
Although a fund of that size could comfortably deal with the failure of individual banks, it would still not be large enough to prevent bank runs sparked by fear of redenomination. Nor could it be assembled quickly enough to calm current fears. And bringing the implicit guarantee of other sovereigns to bear against the risk of redenomination would create new problems.
If a country seemed likely to leave the euro but its deposits were guaranteed in euros, people might be tempted to borrow heavily in their local market and deposit the proceeds in their bank. If the country left, their debts would be redenominated while their savings would be protected. “This would essentially represent a direct transfer of wealth from the rest of the euro zone to the periphery,” says Mr Samuels. A banking union, in other words, might result in the very transfer union that Germany hopes to avoid. |
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