Surprise! Europe’s Banks Are STILL Totally Insolvent … !
- Surprise! Europe’s Banks Are STILL Totally Insolvent…!
by Graham Summers, Phoenix Capital Research, via http://www.zerohedge.com/
While the US continues to bumble its way towards a debt ceiling crisis (somehow our President doesn’t have time to meet work on solving this, but does have time to make sandwiches with volunteers and give press statements about how we wants to work), Europe continues to make us look good by comparison.
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Remember how we were told time and again that Europe was saved? Remember how repeatedly we were told that the European Central Bank (ECB) would do “whatever it takes” to fix things? Turns out all of that was a total load of BS. Indeed, the IMF just announced the following:
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Nobody knows the true scale of potential losses at Europe’s banks, but the International Monetary Fund hinted at the enormity of the problem this month, saying that Spanish and Italian banks face 230 billion euros ($310 billion) of losses alone on credit to companies in the next two years.
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Yet five years after the United States demanded its big banks take on new capital to reassure investors, Europe is still struggling to impose order on its financial system, having given emergency aid to five countries.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/13/us-eurozone-banks-idUSBRE99C03Y20131013
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Remember, Spain was the banking system that was great right up until it demanded a 100 billion Euro bailout. Then only six months later, one of its largest problem banks (which had taken 18 billion Euros in bailout funds) announced it still had a negative valuation.
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The entire EU banking system is insolvent. Unlike the US where the banks raised capital to address their problems, EU banks have not raised capital nor have they reduced their leverage (of 26 to 1 by the way). Instead, they’ve simply swapped garbage assets as collateral to the ECB, which counts this garbage at 100 cents on the Euro, and issues liquidity to the banks.
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read more!
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