Italy Races To Defuse €200 Billion Bad Loan Time Bomb With “Bad Bank”
When Portugal “surprised” senior Novo Banco bondholders with a €2 billion bail-in late last month, the market got an unwelcome reminder that euro periphery banks are far from “solid.”
Novo was supposed to house the “good” assets salvaged from the wreckage of failed lender Banco Espirito Santo, but as it turned out, a lot of those “good” assets were actually bad, and Novo ended up needing to plug a €1.4 billion hole. Initially, the plan was to sell assets but seizing €2 billion from bondholders ended up being a whole lot easier and far more efficient.
News of the bail-in came just a week after Lisbon announced that a second bank – Banif – would need state aid after running out of cash to repay a previous cash injection from the government.
As we head into the weekend, periphery banks are back in the spotlight, only this time in Italy where PM Matteo Renzi is scrambling to put the finishing touches on a plan to guarantee hundreds of billions of NPLs sitting on the books of Italian banks.
Talks with the EU Commission “have already dragged on for two years,” FT notes and need to be concluded over the next few days lest “the whole initiative should collapse.”
Of course Renzi missed what amounted to a deadline on “fixing” the problem under the old rules governing bank resolutions.
One reason the Novo Banco and Banif bail-in and bailout (respectively) were pushed through in what appeared to be a kind of haphazard, ad hoc fashion was because new rules came into effect on January 1 that would have put uninsured depositors on the hook for losses. The same rules require 8% “of a bank’s liabilities to be wiped out before public money can be used,” FT adds.
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