RSS feedErste Bank
’Euro banks are not very popular…
Major fallers across the continent (NOT just the banking sector):
UniCredit, of course, has already unveiled a €7.5bn cash call. It would seem that the guessing now is who is next.
A snap observation from Chintan Joshi at Nomura:
Hung out to dry in emerging Europe
Once upon a time foreign ownership of domestic banking sectors was deemed a “rating strength” in central and eastern Europe.
Before the financial crisis, foreign banks had demonstrated their willingness and ability to support their subsidiaries,
Snap news
Breaking pre-market news on Friday,
- Total says Q3 profits up 13 per cent – statement.
- WPP cuts full-year outlook, says margins to improve – statement.
- Erste Bank to close out CDS portfolio within days – statement.
Erste’s fumble, and where (else) to hide sovereign marks
Those helpful sea creatures at Goldman Sachs have called 36 banks to see if any of them were treating CDS protection sold in the same way that Erste Group was.
To recap, Erste announced a number of extraordinary charges on Monday,
Erste’s extraordinary loss, and CDS philosophy
Erste Group announced some colourful extraordinary charges on Monday morning. Austria’s biggest lender, and the second biggest bank in Eastern Europe, still hasn’t paid back the €1.2bn injection of state funds it received back in 2009,
Who’s exposed to Hungary
Hungary may be frantically trying to backpedal its way out of the eyebrow-raising, and market-moving, comments made by some of its politicians and spokespeople last week.
But that hasn’t stopped JP Morgan from publishing a table of which European banks are most exposed to the country.
Erste Basel-bothered is Austria
It looks like Austria has one more thing to worry about: The Basel banking reforms.
Part of the Committee’s proposals to `purify’ common equity Tier 1 capital for banks involves excluding minority interests from the regulatory measure.
The Emerging Europe debt dog
While the search for yield is setting most emerging markets ablaze in terms of institutional money flow, there is one EM area that appears noticeably excluded from the flow party: Emerging Europe.
As Bloomberg noted on Monday,
No discount for you, says Erste Bank
Austrian lender Erste Bank — heavily invested in the emerging European banking systems of countries like Romania and the Czech Republic – said late Thursday it was launching a €1.6bn no-discount rights issue to bring its capital base in line with raised expectations on mounting loan losses in emerging Europe.
Snap news
Breaking pre-market news on Friday,
- Nationwide UK house price index shows annual house price inflation was positive for first time since March 2008 – statement.
- Cosmen family voices concern about “absence of a well defined strategy”
Banks’ coverage ratio capers, cont.
Look who’s jumped on the bad bank coverage ratio bandwagon — Goldman Sachs.
In a note out today, GS analysts, are also looking at how falling coverage of non-performing loans (NPLs) has fueled this year’s profits among European banks.
Stress-testing Eastern Europe
Well, not Eastern Europe per se, but Western banks’ exposure to the region.
Merrill Lynch’s Global Economics team has done a bit of analysis (emphasis FT Alphaville’s):
A simplistic stress test on Emerging European exposure at listed Western European banks shows the potential for an incremental €13bn of losses.