por admin » Mar Jun 12, 2012 1:04 pm
El ECB dice que Europa necesitan una union de la banca.
ECB Says Euro Zone Needs Banking Union
By TODD BUELL And MARGIT FEHER
The European Central Bank said Tuesday the euro zone needs to create a banking union as an integral part of the bloc's monetary pact to strengthen the financial system and help reduce the growing and potentially risky interdependence of governments and commercial banks.
It also cautioned that the initiative would take time to negotiate and complete and could require substantive changes in national laws.
The Frankfurt-based central bank wrote in its semi-annual Financial Stability Review that a banking union, as suggested by ECB head Mario Draghi last month, needs to shatter the link between domestic banks who have been the main buyers of government bonds in peripheral countries; and governments, which have pumped in billions of euros of public money to stop banks from collapsing.
The banking union must also step up supervision of lenders throughout the region, establish a European deposit guarantee scheme to protect depositors and agree to EU-wide crisis resolution arrangements, the report said.
A banking compact should be conceived "as an integral counterpart of monetary union," the ECB wrote in its report. "These reforms will certainly take time to implement and may require substantive legal changes," including amendments to national laws, the ECB said.
The banking union idea has gained traction in recent weeks but is still viewed skeptically in both Germany and the U.K. Two members of the German central bank's executive board said Tuesday that a banking union can only be accompanied by a fiscal union.
While a banking union "could very well represent a sensible step forward," it "has to follow a deeper fiscal union as it would imply significantly increased risk sharing amongst countries," board member Andreas Dombret said in London.
The bank's vice president, Sabine Lautenschlaeger, said earlier Tuesday that a banking union can work in Europe only if it is accompanied by a fiscal union.
On Monday, Germany's Federal Association of Public Banks said it opposed a banking union proposed by the European Commission on the grounds that it would loot existing deposit insurance funds in Germany.
"It seems to me absurd that our deposit protection schemes, which were built over many years, should be used for insuring savings deposits in euro-zone crisis countries," said association President Christian Brand.
The ECB said its lending of cheap three-year money to banks in the form of Long Term Refinancing Operations wasn't meant as a "substitute for other forms of policy action."
Such non-standard measures have "created breathing space that must be used wisely and effectively," the bank said. Governments must use the time gained by these LTROs "in a decisive manner," it said.
Following two LTROs worth more than one trillion euros ($1.26 trillion) in total in December and February, peripheral country bond yields fell, calming markets and giving time for leaders to discuss longer term solutions to the bloc's financial difficulties. But Spanish and Italian yields have risen recently to almost unsustainable levels after Madrid asked for funds from the euro zone to shore up its capital-starved banks.
"The first—and arguably most concerning—key risk to euro area financial stability relates to sovereign vulnerabilities," the ECB said, noting the rise in bond yields along with signs of tension in bond markets. The ECB said that reversing these trends required action to address the vulnerability persisting among a number of euro-zone states.
"The outlook for financial stability remains very challenging in the euro area," the ECB said.
"It is clear that several euro area countries need to repair both their fiscal positions and prospects, as do other major advanced economies," the ECB said.
It said there was an increasing risk to financial stability from weak growth in the euro-zone economy and that "a weak growth outlook plagues several euro area countries," as well as uncertainty about how rigorously structural reforms are being implemented and their effectiveness in terms of competitiveness and productivity. Until such risks to fiscal sustainability have been dealt with "convincingly," the risk of a worsening debt crisis "remains key to euro area financial stability," the ECB concluded.
The ECB also said a deterioration of the euro zone or global economic outlook could both create volatility in asset prices and hurt borrowers' collateral values, thus limiting the availability of credit.
Risks could also emerge from "exogenous factors," such as an oil price shock "or a hard landing of a key emerging market economy," a thinly-veiled reference to China.
The ECB said that to contain the contractionary impact of necessary fiscal consolidation in the euro zone, "appropriate policies for economic growth are needed, including, notably, growth enhancing structural measures in euro area countries."
The ECB's Mr. Draghi called in late April for the formation of a "Growth Compact" to complement the "Fiscal Compact," which is designed to curtail excessive deficit spending and accumulation of debt in the euro zone.