Italy Just Bailed Out Another Failed Bank, May Use Pension Funds For Future Bank Rescues
Despite – or perhaps due to – Italy’s failed attempt to slide a state-funded €40 billion recapitalization attempt past Angela Merkel while blaming it on Brexit, and coupled with a bailout proposal to provide €150 billion in liquidity to insolvent banks, overnight we got yet another confirmation that the biggest risk factor for Europe is not Brexit but Italy, where yet another failed bank was bailed out. As the FT reports overnight, Atlante, Italy’s privately backed €5bn bank bailout fund which was created in April to stem the threat of contagion from struggling lenders and whose assets turned out to be woefully inadequate, took control of Veneto Banca after a €1bn capital increase demanded by EU bank regulators attracted zero interest.
This is good news for Veneto Banco and bad news for all other insolvent banks, because the fund, known as Atlas in English, was intended to hold up the sky for Italian banks. Instead it is now practically out of funds, having depleted more than half of its war chest after taking control of Popolare di Vicenza, another regional bank, last month.
That has left little in reserve to tackle about €200bn in non-performing loans run up during Italy’s three-year recession, of which €85bn have not yet been written down. Bad loans are weighing on bank lending and crimping an already weak recovery.
As the FT adds, Lorenzo Codogno, an economist and former treasury director-general, said: “Italian [and to a lesser extent European] banks have entered into a negative loop where they cannot ask for private capital as there is no investor appetite and without capital they cannot provision or write off NPLs.”
This means the only hope is public-funded bailouts, however that is banned by eurozone regulations.
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