What’s amazing to me is that no one seems upset, or concerned, about Europe’s most indebted nation needing a bank bailout by the EU. Not even a belch from the media about this huge event looming.
Italian banks, like Unicredit, have been hammered this year, down 2/3rds. This FTSE MIB is off by 25% in 2016, yet no one bats so much as an eyelash at these harrowing events unfolding.
At any rate, one man screaming in the wilderness, Jim Millstein, former restructuring chief at the U.S. Treasury is warning of contagion.
There’s a risk of “potential financial contagion” under rules designed to limit taxpayer bailout costs by inflicting losses on investors when banks fall short on capital, Millstein, who now runs his own firm, said Tuesday in a Bloomberg Television interview.
“There’s a safety valve for state aid,” he said. “So you could see the EU fashioning what we would call open bank assistance, which is, in effect, what we did with TARP,” a reference to the Troubled Asset Relief Program in 2008 in which the U.S. took stakes in the largest U.S. lenders.
The big hold up now is who will eat the losses for Italy’s enormous $400 billion bad loans. Naturally, the banksters want public funds to paper over it and help them avoid hard losses. The Italian Prime Minister is siding with the banksters.
“This would be one of the first big bail-ins done in the new regime, and the thought was that would avoid contagion by foisting losses on bondholders and shareholders,” Millstein said. However, because the banks’ bonds were sold to depositors, “You’re inflicting damage to the people who would otherwise be spending money in your economy.”
Italy’s $400b bad loan portfolio represents a third of the EU’s total.
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