For a few hours on June 7, Banco Popular had three owners: the previous shareholders, the FROB and Banco Santander; a quick trip, with a stop in between for a bit of a respite, before changing its skin. The Single Resolution Mechanism (SRM), in other words the ECB, decided on Tuesday that Popular was inviable and immediately started the liquidation process which begins with a bail-in.
Time has come to reassess the ECB’s strategy. The Central Bank can no longer overlook the economy’s marked improvement. Nor can it ignore the fact that the money market price is at lower levels than warranted by the current environment. It should act swiftly.
When Ms. May called for General UK Elections, she was fully confident of a landslide victory. Jeremy Corbyn seemed no match for her. But successive blunders and a rather clumsy campaign have led to an unforeseen revival on the part of the Labour party. But the best result for the UK and Europe would be either a landslide victory for Ms. May or an unexpected Labour win.
The ECB’s preliminary report on the structural financial indicators relating to the EU banking industry flag that the number of banking subsidiaries fell 4.8% in 26 countries last year, without taking into account figures from the UK and Ireland because they were not yet available. There were 28,807 bank branches in Spain at end-2016, compared with 32,026 in Germany, 37,261 in France or 29,335 in Italy. The figures also show the level of consolidation in the banking sector, measured by the share of assets held by the five largest lenders.
Nick Ottens via Atlantic Sentinel | Britain’s Labour Party has narrowed the gap with the ruling Conservatives in the polls, going up from an average of 25 percent support when Prime Minister Theresa May called an election last month to nearly 35 percent.
James Alexander | As some debate raged in the corridors of the ECB about both Draghi’s successor and over when and how to end the QE for the EUR, the common currency remained strong, helping keep the USD weak.
Fernando Rodríguez | The MifidII obliges the 100,000 professionals who inform and advise on finances in Spain to be accredited as being technically qualified to do this job by January 2018. Spain is the only country in Europe which doesn’t have any regulation in place regarding professional qualifications.
The balancing acts which are devised in Frankfurt oblige us to once again take a look at the present and future of inflation in the Eurozone, focusing our analysis on the prices chain. “The ECB did this exercise and the conclusions favour the institution’s caution,” they explain.
In these uncertain times, politics seems to have lost many of the certainties that had been so clearly signposted for voters in the Western World in recent decades. The terms “left” and “right” have often become hard to pin down, especially since the arrival of a gamut of disruptive populisms.
New French president Emmanuel Macron wants to solve the problem of the stability of the euro and its finances once and for all, by implementing some kind of European Fiscal Union.