I hope this report is wrong, but just in case it isn't I thought I'd post a link to it and a small excript. I know it scared the holly crap out me when I first read it.
European Commission officials have estimated that impaired assets may amount to 44pc of EU bank balance sheets. The Commission estimates that so-called financial instruments in the trading book total £12.3 trillion (13.7 trillion euros), equivalent to about 33pc of EU bank balance sheets.
In addition, so-called 'available for sale instruments' worth £4trillion (4.5 trillion euros), or 11pc of balance sheets, are also added by the Commission to arrive at the headline figure of £16.3 trillion.
Here is the link posted below
http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north689.html
Thursday, February 19, 2009
The Looming Collapse of European Banking
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2 Kommentare:
i'm afraid my english is not good enough to fully understand the article. but from what i understand i'm worried. in the news overhere, everyday there's new catastrophies and more and more banks and companies are asking for government backed financial aid. i'm too much of a novice in these sort of things to give proper insight, but if the world wide economy won't pick up in the near future, man, it's gonna be worse than the weimar republic, believe me. everyone on the street is strangely calm about the depression, but in the end it seems more like "what can one do??"
sorry to be so superficial, but i don't have more insight.
mk
I hear you. How bad this all turns out depends on how true the report is, and how the respective European governments react to it.
If the report is true then it means that European banks are about 16 times worse off then American banks, and American banks are in trouble. If it's false then in all likelihood they are no worse off then American banks, which is still bad.
The reaction of governments will determine how long the badness will last. If they try and keep alive "soft socialism" it could end up being pretty bad for a long time. If they let the market correct it would likely be pretty bad but for a shorter period of time.
In the end, it's going to be bad either way.
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