O BES e a Grécia

No Crooked Timber, Daniel Davies (exige leitura cuidadosa e crítica, mas vale a pena);

Here’s something which struck me when I was putting together an end of year review of developments in bank regulation. Euroland had a real, credible stress test and it wasn’t the one that we were all looking at. The real stress test in 2014 was the restructuring of Banco Espirito Santo. 

The successful outcome from BES must surely encourage the Eurosystem policy makers to think that Greek euro exit, if it happens, could be contained. It’s no longer all that likely that any Euroland bank has big enough Greek exposure to knock over its capital, and even if there is a genuine liquidity squeeze, the ECB can pour out liquidity support much more aggressively than it did in 2011, because it knows that its own balance sheet risk is small. In 2011, theESCB’s unsecured funding was at risk of loss, because in the event of insolvency it would be just another unsecured creditor in most European legal systems. In 2015, the new structures of the Bank Resolution and Recovery Directive means that the ECB, along with all other short term and interbank creditors, get to effectively jump the priority structure by putting banks into BES-style resolution, making themselves safe by hosing the long term creditors without ever letting them see the inside of a bankruptcy court.