Michel Rocard and Pierre Larrouturou - Spot on!! Fresh credit crunch fears as banks park record €453bn cash with ECB | Business. Fresh fears about the eurozone banking system were raised when record amounts of cash were deposited with the European Central Bank and Italy's UniCredit spooked markets with a cash call on investors. Some €453bn (£378bn) was lodged in the ECB's "deposit facility" on Tuesday night in a move that some analysts feared showed banks were so concerned about lending it out to rivals that they would rather earn just 0.25% in interest from the central bank.
The ECB also revealed that €15bn had been used from its emergency lending facility overnight on Tuesday, following €14.8bn borrowed the previous day. Bank stocks retreated from a stronger start to the new year after the Italian bank UniCredit attempted to entice investors to back a €7.5bn cash call by offering a big discount on the existing price of its shares. "Interbank funding markets are getting more credit crunched, not less," said Louise Cooper, markets analyst at BCG Partners.
Most of the focus was on the banking sector. Self-serving myths of Europe’s neo-Calvinists. It is a forensic look into the deeper causes of Europe’s crisis and why the reactionary policies being imposed on two thirds of the eurozone by Germany’s Wolfgang Schauble and the northern neo-Calvinists – with input from 1930s liquidationists at the ECB – will lead to certain disaster. It has been out for a week, but I have only got round to reading it. Better late than never.
The CER is a pro-EU group with a broadly free-market leaning. The short answer is that the introduction of the euro spurred the emergence of enormous macroeconomic imbalances that were unsustainable, and that the eurozone has proved institutionally ill-equipped to tackle. North European policy-makers have been reluctant to accept this interpretation.
Indeed. Eurozone debt crisis: the key charts you need to understand what's happening | News. How bad are things in Europe - and how does each country compare? This week has seen anti-austerity strikes and protests across Southern Europe, with Greece, Italy and Spain all hit by disturbances. In Europe's largest ever coordinated industrial action, tens of thousands of workers took to the streets on Wednesday after the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) issued a statement that austerity is "dragging Europe into economic stagnation, indeed recession". Having rallied the previous day, markets across Europe fell on Wednesday, with the FTSE 100, Dax (Germany), Cac (France) and Ibex (Spain) all closing down. We wanted to see which key indicators are the best for comparing Europe and might help us understand what's going on a little better.
The best source for this info is Eurostat. You can download the full data below. 1. These are the big scary numbers - although it's still regularly mixed up with the deficit (see below) by journalists and politicians alike. 2. 3. 4. 5. An Overview of the Euro Crisis - Interactive. Arrows show imbalances of debt exposure between borrowers in one country and banks in another; arrows point from debtors to their bank creditors. Arrow widths are proportional to the balance of money owed. For example, French borrowers owe Italian banks $50.6 billion; Italian borrowers owe French banks $416.4 billion. The difference — their imbalance — shows France's banking system more exposed to Italian debtors by about $365.8 billion.
The risk to countries’ debts and economies is indicated by color: More worrisome Greece amassed a huge debt that it has scant hope of repaying. A chaotic Greek default could hurt all European banks and pension funds that have extended Greece credit and cause a wider bank panic. If there is no firewall or if it is inadequate, it would be easy to imagine a run on banks. If no preventative measures are taken, a chain of events like this could unfold: In reaction to a Greek collapse, investors become worried about their exposure to other risks in the region. The Hole in Europe’s Bucket.