纽约时报：欧洲央行向523家银行“贷款”5000亿

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欧洲央行向523家银行“贷款”5000亿
欧洲央行向523家银行“贷款”5000亿 Central Bank Loans Ease Euro Credit Strain, for NowBy DAVID JOLLY AND JACK EWINGPublished: December 21, 2011 New York Times


PARIS — After more than a year of frustrating and mostly fruitless summit meetings of European political leaders, the European Central Bank appears to have found a more promising way to ease the euro zone crisis: give money to banks at bargain-basement rates.

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Virginia Mayo/Associated Press

European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, center, said this week that helping smaller banks was crucial because they provide most of the credit to small businesses.

The E.C.B., making an offer too good for Europe’s banks to refuse, reported Wednesday that it had doled out almost half a trillion euros in low-cost three-year loans to keep credit flowing at a time when European banks are finding it all but impossible to finance their operations through normal market channels.
The lending reduces the “risk of a Lehman-type situation, where banks go into the new year facing a wave of refinancing and are unable to access the market,” said Jacques Cailloux, the chief euro zone economist at Royal Bank of Scotland.
But it is probably only a temporary solution. By acting essentially as a lender of last resort to the European financial system, the E.C.B. managed mainly to buy time for Europe to work out its longer-range problems of excessive debts, lagging economic competitiveness and limited fiscal unity.
The E.C.B. allocated €489.2 billion, or $639 billion, to 523 institutions, well above the roughly €300 billion estimate of analysts polled by Reuters and Bloomberg News.
Even as Mario Draghi, the new E.C.B. president, continues to resist calls to stand directly behind sovereign debtors without limit, the scale of the liquidity injection suggested that the E.C.B. is prepared to indirectly support them through the banking system.
Carl B. Weinberg, chief economist at High Frequency Economics and a self-described bear on the European outlook, said he was stunned by the size of the monetary operation, saying it suggested Mr. Draghi had “shown a path toward averting catastrophic collapse in Europe.”
Coupled with an easing of reserve requirements announced this month, Mr. Weinberg said, the results suggested that the E.C.B. had injected around €400 billion into the financial system so far in December.
“This is exactly what happened in the United States with the Fed in 2008,” Mr. Weinberg said. “They bought toxic assets and withdrew them from the market, and gave the money they printed to the banks, who put that money into the government bonds that were sold to fund TARP.” (TARP is the acronym for one of the U.S. bailout funds used to protect the U.S. banking system from failure.)
Mr. Draghi has been reluctant to involve the E.C.B. directly in the market for sovereign debt, saying the bank is forbidden by treaty from financing governments or engaging in the sort of “quantitative easing,” or pumping money into the economy, carried out by the U.S. Federal Reserve and others.
But Carsten Brzeski, an economist in Brussels with ING Group, said the infusion of funds Wednesday nonetheless “amounted to a bit of a backdoor Q.E.,” because the funds made available to the banks could then be lent to European governments at higher rates with little risk. That should ease the strains within both the banking system and the market for European government bonds.
In exchange for collateral, lenders borrowed at the E.C.B.’s benchmark interest rate, currently 1 percent. Mr. Brzeski noted they could then use the funds to purchase the debt of euro zone governments, pocketing the difference as profit. Spanish bonds of two-year duration, for example, yield around 3.4 percent; in Italy rates are even higher.
Mr. Draghi acknowledged during a speech to the European Parliament on Monday that banks might be doing just that. “We don’t know how many government bonds they are going to buy,” he said.
Strong demand at recent Spanish debt auctions has driven down yields, suggesting that banks are loading up on the debt to use as collateral for the E.C.B. loans, analysts said. But there are limits to their appetites for sovereign debt at a time when they are trying to reduce their vulnerability to a potential debt default by a country like Greece or Italy, and protect themselves against the possibility of a breakup of the euro zone.
The injection of three-year funds was one of the new measures announced by the E.C.B. on Dec. 8 to calm European credit markets. It was the first time that the E.C.B. had extended such loans for longer than about a year.
The E.C.B. also broadened the range of collateral it would accept in return for the loans. The central bank is even accepting outstanding loans as security, a measure designed to help smaller community banks that may lack conventional forms of collateral like bonds.
Mr. Brzeski at ING said the amount of uptake by lenders Wednesday showed that “there is obvious demand for liquidity, and it’s cheap. There’s almost a free lunch out there, so even banks that didn’t need liquidity would be thinking, ‘Why not be part of it?”’
The three-year loans will help to compensate for a dearth of longer-term market funding, at a time when banks are facing the need to roll over an extraordinarily high amount of their own debt. Banks in the euro zone must raise more than €200 billion in the first three months of 2012, according to data compiled by Dealogic and cited by the E.C.B.
Banks often borrow money for relatively short periods and loan it for longer periods, profiting from the difference in interest rates. But this so-called maturity transformation means that banks must continually roll over their debts. An otherwise healthy bank can fail if it is not able to raise fresh cash.
The central bank hopes to attack the financing stress again in February with another offering of three-year funds.
Economists estimated that €190 billion to €270 billion of the funds issued Wednesday represented new lending. The rest, Mr. Cailloux said, was used by banks in “recycling liquidity that was already in the system,” shifting from shorter maturities into three-year loans.
The new money will probably have little effect on the money supply, at least initially, and is unlikely to lead to higher inflation because Europe appears headed for an economic downturn that will discourage much private borrowing. Gilles Moëc, co-head of economic research for Deutsche Bank, said the risk of higher inflation was minimal because “that would require that the banks were actually making loans to the private sector, and we think that’s going to take a while” — at least six to nine months.
While the E.C.B. has been buying Spanish and Italian bonds on the secondary market since August, it has been “sterilizing” all such moves by withdrawing liquidity elsewhere in the financial system. But the liquidity operations Wednesday were unsterilized.
While the initial reaction was positive, “we’ll see if this is sustained,” Mr. Cailloux said. “I don’t want to downplay the importance of the E.C.B.’s action, but the euro’s problems are bigger than that, with political and economic dimensions that still need to be addressed.”

Jack Ewing reported from Frankfurt.


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