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’On the flightiness of uninsured deposits
There’s a heated debate going on in the blogosphere between Amar Bhidé, professor at Tufts’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and Felix Salmon, Reuters blogger extraordinaire. Reuters’ Peter Thal Larsen has also waded in.
European banks’ slow run on… themselves
There’s been a lot of focus on US money market withdrawals from European banks adding to the current market stress in Europe. But could this be a bit of a red herring?
Kash Mansori at the Street Light blog has pulled data from the ECB’s data warehouse,
Hooray for, erm, Greek ELA?
Things you might not have noticed in recent Greek bank results:
Eurobank EFG ability to generate recurring profits is reflected in pre provision income, which amounted to €749m in 1H2011 or €324m in 2Q2011,
Carried away in Switzerland [updated]
Negative rates have arrived! In Switzerland, anyway.
Which means the risk of the Swiss franc becoming a funding currency for carry trade — à la the Japanese yen — is very real.
That said, volatility is still the issue.
The popping of Southsea
This piece of news slipped most of the world by…
A court order has been made to place Southsea Mortgage and Investment Company into the Bank Insolvency Procedure and appoint BDO LLP as the bank liquidator.
The return of the sovereign-bank loop?
Exactly where you wouldn’t want it, too. Spain.
FT Alphaville readers will remember that a whole bailout-load of eurozone debt worries kicked off once banks started buying up their respective government bonds post-financial crisis.
The humble Greek (and Argentine) depositor
It’s been a day of Argentine parallels to Greece, but this one is especially striking.
Alex Bellefleur of Brockhouse Cooper points out the following charts — one for deposit drains in Argentina back then and Greece now:
Moody’s on Spain’s regional, retail shift
To the sunny climes of Valencia, Spain.
Where the region’s local government has just decided to issue up to €900m one-year and two-year retail bonds. It’s part of a regional Spanish trend, you see.
Bank of Ireland – on the liquidity brink back in January, and err, April
From Bank of Ireland’s just-published annual report for 2010:
The Central Bank requires that banks have sufficient resources (cash inflows and marketable assets) to cover 100% of expected cash outflows in the 0 to 8 day time horizon and 90% of expected cash outflows in the 8 day to 30 day time horizon.
Michael Pettis on China’s very own zaiteku
Here’s something for anyone who thought last week’s bank lending figures from the People’s Bank of China showed the country was succeeding in its tightening efforts.
It’s a statement from PBoC member Sheng Songcheng.
Why Chinese rate hikes may be futile
We’ve talked on FT Alphaville about how China is openly looking to quantitative tightening tools for battling inflation rather than outright interest rate hikes.
Much of this is down to the Chinese wanting to strike a balance between such factors as the dollar peg and household consumption,
On declining Irish deposits
At some point this morning Allied Irish Banks will finally get round to publishing its trading update. While we wait for that statement to hit the wires, Citigroup has published a report on Irish bank deposits and the extent to which the system is now reliant on funding from the eurosystem.
The ECB exit hurts — hurts like negative €12.6bn
The European Central Bank wants out. That much is clear.
In recent months the ECB has been funding eurozone banks to the tune of squillions, with financials using government bonds, asset-backed securities and the like,
Scenes from an asset-liability mismatch
It’s three years to the day since the UK retail bank Northern Rock suddenly found its access to short-term funding markets frozen — setting the Rock up for collapse one month later, amid a depositor run.
Bank Grεεkery, the preview
Mark your calendars.
A slew of Greek banks will be reporting first-quarter earnings next week.
The schedule looks like this according to Credit Swiss (all times are UK time) :
Bank of Cyprus will report on May 26 before the market open.
Chart du jour: The Greek bank deposit plunge
From IHS Global Insight senior economist Diego Iscaro on Thursday, a chart of the total deposits held at Greek financial institutions:
As Iscaro notes, the chart is inspired by the fact that four Greek lenders asked the government for access to the country’s support fund on Wednesday to counter falling deposit levels in the first two months of the year.
A Grεεk bank run smackdown
Some potentially positive news for Greek banks, for once, and some possible embarrassment for financial blog Zero Hedge on Wednesday.
Harvinder Sian, head of European rates at RBS, is taking the excitable blog to task for its Tuesday story about Greek nationals pulling money out of local banks.
Switching banks: Learn to love the one you’re with
James Surowiecki raises some interesting points in a column in this week’s New Yorker magazine on why big US banks are getting even bigger and more powerful as a result of the financial crisis.
The simple answer is that the combination of a series of banking mergers and the disappearance of competitors such as Lehman Brothers left the surviving institutions in much better shape than before.