Germany: the Eurozone's fifth column | 67 comments (67 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)

Banks (4.00 / 2)

A lot of the French and German banks' exposure to these countries is through direct ownership of banks there. I fail to see why these local banks would be in any worse position than the other local banks, which are not necessarily in a bad way because of public sector deficits (other than the fact they probably own quite a bit of government bonds, but that's still a fraction of their balance sheets, and in their case it makes sense to have your own government's bonds...

Wind power

by Jerome a Paris (etg@eurotrib.com) on Sun Jun 20th, 2010 at 11:39:09 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Banks (4.00 / 2)

It's written in the media that just over half of Spanish debt owned by German banks is money lent to Spanish banks.

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Sun Jun 20th, 2010 at 12:22:13 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Banks (4.00 / 12)

In the Germany-as-Machiavelli version, that doesn't really matter: What matters is that it can be spun as "shiftless PIGS creating a crisis - we have to save our stalwart German bankers from those irresponsible brown people."

In the Germany-as-Clueless version, it doesn't necessarily matter either, because the markets have the predictive power of a bipolar crack monkey and the attention span of a ferret on speed, and our politicians are so thoroughly indoctrinated that they could have most of their higher brain functions replaced by Bloomberg feeds and nobody would notice the difference.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Sun Jun 20th, 2010 at 04:21:59 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Banks (4.00 / 2)

JakeS:

so thoroughly indoctrinated that they could have most of their higher brain functions replaced by Bloomberg feeds and nobody would notice the difference.

ROFLMAO

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Sun Jun 20th, 2010 at 04:44:36 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Banks (4.00 / 2)

As Mig suggested:

Migeru:

I am on the record suggesting to replace governments with roomfulls of monkeys at Bloomberg terminals.

by Bernard (bernard) on Mon Jun 21st, 2010 at 07:09:16 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Germany: the Eurozone's fifth column | 67 comments (67 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

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