Los CDS (los seguros de cambio por si un país/banco quiebra) disparados. Los de los países en la estratosfera, incluido el de Alemania que sube también. La Merkel erre que erre, no da su brazo a torcer. Mucha gente convencida de que la solución de los EUROBONOS es la buena. Yo dudo su viabilidad y dudo de la voluntad política de Alemania (creo que piensa más en salvarse ellos, que en salvarnos a los demás), pero ojalá los pongan en marcha…y tengamos una tregua.
Hungría, en rescate por el FMI y con su bono de calificación basura, tiene un CDS 647.51 récord…
Resumen de lo malo: Hoy viernes los CDS del Banco de Santander estaban en 471.5 tras subir este día 23.6 puntos y 170 puntos en los últimos 10 días…
Otros CDS de otras entidades grandes bancarias (los de las pequeñas mejor no te los pongo que te asustarías):
La columna de la izquierda son las caídas de lo que llevamos de año de sus acciones!!! (11 meses)
Más negativismo:
European banks' asset sales face disastrous failure
Sales talks end in failure, leaving banks with piles of assets but no funding
(NOTE: This story appears in the November 26 issue of the International Financing Review, along with a range of related articles)
European banks are being forced to abandon their efforts to sell off trillions of euros worth of loans, mortgages and real estate after a series of talks with potential investors broke down, leaving many already struggling firms with piles of assets they can barely support.
Lenders have instead turned their attention to reducing the burden of carrying such assets over months and years, with many looking at popular pre-crisis "capital alchemy" arrangements to minimise capital requirements and boost their ability to use the assets to tap central banks for cash.
Deadlocked talks with potential buyers – a mix of private equity firms, hedge funds, foreign banks and insurers – show little sign of making breakthroughs, say bankers taking part in those negotiations, with the stalemate threatening to block the industry's ability to save itself from collapse through a mass deleveraging.
"European banks have spent far too long saying everything is fine, when it really isn't," said one banker at a US bank who has been advising European clients on their options. "They are slowly realising that they just won't be able to do what the market is expecting. We are edging slowly closer to the depths of the crisis."
Some of Europe's largest banks, including BNP Paribas and Societe Generale, have in recent weeks pledged to sell assets. Together, firms are expected to shrink their balance sheets by as much as €5trn over the next three years – equivalent to about 20% of the region's total annual economic output – through a combination of sales, asset run-off and recapitalisations.
Draconian measures
A funding squeeze has prompted the Draconian measures. Since the summer, most banks have been unable to tap traditional sources such as unsecured bond markets. As old debts come due – some €1.7trn will roll over in the next three years alone – banks need to find cash to avoid bankruptcy.
"Banks are feeling pain on both sides of the balance sheet," said Alberto Gallo, head of European credit strategy at RBS. "On the one side you have a funding squeeze with banks unable to raise cash in the capital markets. At the same time, many of the assets they hold are deteriorating in quality."
"Banks need to reduce their balance sheets as much as €5trn in assets over the next three years or so," he added. "The problem is that there just aren't enough buyers. Most banks will be forced to hold on to much of this stuff to maturity, which will affect their ability to lend and impact on the real economy."
People involved in asset sale talks say price is the major sticking point. Lenders want only to sell higher-quality assets near to par value so as to avoid huge write-downs, which would erode capital further. By contrast, potential buyers want high-yielding investments and are offering only knock-down prices.
"There is a huge amount of liquidity among investors right now, but they only want to buy at distressed prices," said Stefano Marsaglia, a chairman within the financial institutions group at Barclays Capital. "Lots of discussions are taking place but there is a gulf in terms of pricing."
The homogeneity of assets on offer is also complicating the negotiations – a number of Dutch lenders, for example, all want to sell very similar mortgage-backed securities. Several bankers advising such clients were unanimous in saying that the deals will struggle to happen.
Vast overhang
There is also a vast overhang of unsold assets from the initial part of the crisis. Many banks such as Commerzbank, RBS, WestLB and even the Irish government set up legacy units – or bad banks – that were charged with winding down and selling those assets. That process is still ongoing.
"Selling assets is a positive to announce, but it's going to be very challenging for all the banks that have announced asset sales to get them done," said Marc Tempelman, head of EMEA financial institutions capital markets and financing at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. "Everyone is selling similar assets."
He added: "Many banks in Europe have been looking to sell assets for the past couple of years. If those disposals haven't been closed in better markets, what makes anyone think they can do it now in larger amounts and much more volatile markets?"
Looking for alternatives
Without the cash that would have been generated through outright asset sales, struggling European banks are now looking at alternative levers. The problem is that traditional options such as issuing equity, increasing deposits or consolidation just aren't feasible.
That has prompted banks to turn to more creative solutions, with some now looking at what one banker termed as pre-crisis "capital alchemy" arrangements to reduce capital needs. Such methods can also in some cases make assets which banks hold to maturity eligible for ECB repo operations.
Securitisation is at the heart of such arrangements. Assets with low ratings are pooled together into diversified portfolios in order to attain a higher rating. The resulting asset requires less cash and as a result of the higher rating can be more readily pledged to the ECB or to other banks to borrow against.
Bankers point to an increased number of retained securitisations in recent months as an indication that banks are using the process to ease the burden of holding such assets through to maturity. Spanish banks in particular have securitised billions of euros worth of corporate loans since early October.
"It's not just about selling," said Marsaglia. "Banks are also looking at ways of re-evaluating the risk weightings of some assets by pooling them together and in some cases people are securitising those pools to get better ratings. There is a lot of work going on around that right now."
Still, the practice is not a panacea to banks' asset and liability problems. Although it can open the door to using ECB repo facilities by making collateral meet strict eligibility criteria, assets pledged are still subject to a haircut, meaning banks cannot borrow enough to fund the asset in question.
Use of the facility is surging, nevertheless. ECB lending to banks spiralled this week, with 178 lenders requesting €247bn in one-week loans, the highest in two years. Bankers warn that if banks are unable to sell assets, the ECB will have to play a much bigger role in funding banks.
"Natural deleveraging through not renewing loans is one of the few options remaining to banks to shrink their balance sheets, but the timetable for implementing this kind of strategy can be very protracted," said Ryan O'Grady, head of fixed income syndicate for EMEA at JP Morgan.
Y mientras tanto, el BCE haciendo horas extra, comprando a saco deuda italiana y española. La suerte del que se la quita de las manos. Hoy unos brindan con champán y otros con vinagre… Se manipulan los mercados, se mete dinero para frenar caídas, se hace lo que se puede. Un abrazo y a esperar otra semanita más…
PD1: No nos enteramos de la mitad. ¿Qué tendrá este hombre en la cabeza? A ver si tenemos suerte y se asesora bien…
Spain's Rajoy Seeks Proposals for Bad Bank
Bloomberg - Spanish Prime Minister-elect Mariano Rajoy has asked for at least two papers from academics on how to create a so-called bad bank, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
Both proposals outline mechanisms for a state-backed agency to buy soured assets such as real estate from banks at a discount, said the people, who declined be named because the process isn't public.
According to one of the proposals, Spain needs external financing of about 100 billion euros ($133 billion) to absorb the cost of transferring assets to the bad bank and should seek it from the European Financial Stability Fund or theInternational Monetary Fund, one of the people said. Both options call for valuations of real estate to be made by independent appraisers, the people said.
The People's Party, which won the Nov. 20 general elections in Spain by a landslide, has pledged a "cleanup and restructuring" of the country's banking system to help restore the supply of credit in an economy where lending is shrinking at its fastest pace on record. Spanish banks, burdened with 176 billion euros of what the Bank of Spain terms "troubled"assets linked to real estate, are fighting to preserve profit as lending slumps and their cost of financing surges.
Real-Estate Issue
Rajoy hasn't been specific about how he'll make banks deal with real estate on their books. His electoral program said his government would make it easier to "actively manage" the industry's impaired assets so that they can be sold off.
Rajoy said three days before the election that while he favored more "groupings" of lenders, he didn't support the idea of a bad bank. A PP spokeswoman, who declined to be named in line with policy, said yesterday the party had nothing to add to what it said in the electoral program.
Still, Faes, a Madrid-based research institute that is linked to the PP and chaired by former Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, favors creating a bad bank, Jaime Garcia-Legaz, secretary general of the organization, said in an interview on Oct. 24.
Luis de Guindos, a former deputy finance minister under Aznar, said in an interview he wants to "eliminate all doubts"about valuation of real estate on the balance sheets of banks.
Fallout Debate
The 52 percent of the more than 300 billion euros of assets linked to developers that the Bank of Spain deems to be"troubled" dwarfs other risky assets held by the industry such as the combined 13 billion euros banks own of Greek, Italian, Portuguese and Irish sovereign debt. Banks may face more than 60 billion euros of losses they haven't covered with reserves as the economy risks tipping back into a recession, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA (BBVA)'s research department said in a Nov. 8 report.
The debate about how to tackle the fallout from the collapse of Spain's 10-year real-estate boom has been playing out in the opinion columns of the country's newspapers.
Aristobulo de Juan, a former head of banking supervision who helped tackle an industry crisis in the 1980s that caused the collapse of more than 50 lenders, said in a Nov. 17 column in Expansion that he favored using deposit guarantee funds as a bad bank that would absorb real-estate losses with the costs shared by the Bank of Spain and lenders.
PD2: Encima los sociatas van y perdonan los pecadillos jurídicos de los banqueros. Si es que qué tendrán los banqueros que todos les devuelven los favores… Poderoso caballero don dinero…
PD3: Este es nuestro problema, que el bono a dos años sube y sube. Esto denota que no tenemos financiación alguna. Cuando no se fían de que a dos años le vas a devolver el dinero, los males se agudizan. Hoy la escalada ha seguido hacia arriba…hasta el 6,06% que cotiza en estos momentos…uff. Esto está francamente delicado.
