Eurozone Banking Crisis Is Both Global and National

by Clive Corcoran

Having completely failed investors at the most critical time in generations by comprehensively misjudging the credit risk of CDO’s and other exotic structured instruments, the three major credit ratings agencies (CRA’s) now seem to be overly anxious not to be accused of being asleep at the wheel with respect to the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis.On May 23rd S&P changed its outlook on Italian public debt from stable to negative and all of the agencies seem to be trying to differentiate between different shades of “junk” in regard to Greece’s debt.

In the case of sovereign debt the CRA’s might want to think of a new category somewhere between investment grade and default which would be equivalent to the need for creditors – in most cases private sector banks – to seek a bail out from their respective domestic public sectors.

Mervyn King once observed that the world’s major banks are “global in life but national in death” and this is really the overwhelming issue beneath the tip of the iceberg that seems to preoccupy most commentary on the Eurozone debt crisis. Should there be an ultimate unraveling of the duct tape that is holding together the “solutions” that have been hatched by the European Central Bank and the enormous contingent of the smartest from Europe’s business schools, then it will be the German, French, Swedish, and UK governments – to name just a few – that will have to clean up the mess. And that clean up will – despite all attempts to conceal it with smoke and mirrors – amount to yet another transfer of mistakes made by hapless bankers to the future generations of European taxpayers.

One supposed way out of this outcome would be for the Eurozone to become something like a United States of Europe with a federal guarantee provision for the European Central Bank and mechanisms for fiscal transfers. The only problem with this pathway is that electorates across the more prosperous parts of Europe are unlikely to enable their elected officials to enact such a re-structuring of the EMU.

Ironically if they don’t act together then as the troubled European banks “die nationally” as aptly characterized by Mervyn King, the outcome may not be very different from having the whole mess transferred to a federal Eurozone balance sheet.

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About Clive Corcoran

Clive Corcoran is an FSA registered investment adviser providing private client wealth management services, as well as being an author, financial educator/mentor and an independent trader.   He has written “Long/Short Market Dynamics: Trading Strategies for Today’s Markets” (Wiley, 2007) and two textbooks, “Financial Markets, and Portfolio Construction Theory” and “Wealth Management”.  He currently is a director of Morphology Management Inc. which has developed a systematic trading platform. Clive has been a regular analyst/contributor to CNBC Europe and other broadcast outlets.  Previously he was the founder and CEO of a personal and business management company for entertainment professionals that operated in Los Angeles, London, Munich and Toronto.  Clive’s Blog Morph366