Though it is too soon to gauge any longer-term benefits, the move, by the European Central Bank, could be a turning point in the Continent’s debt crisis — a cascading problem that for nearly two years has plagued financial markets around the world and now threatens global economic growth.
American officials and global economists have long urged the Europe’s central bank to take just such an aggressive stance — even as European political leaders have repeatedly failed to devise concrete near-term plans to address Europe’s debt problems and deteriorating finances.
Carl B. Weinberg, chief economist at the consulting firm High Frequency Economics and a professed bear on the European outlook, said he was stunned by the size of the monetary operation, saying it suggested that Europe’s central bank had “shown a path toward averting catastrophic collapse in Europe.”
Indeed, some analysts suggest the central bank’s new lending program represents a kind of back door to the easy-money policy pursued by the Federal Reserve after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, which is widely credited with averting a broader economic disaster.
The three-year loans the central bank made Wednesday come with a bargain-basement interest rate of 1 percent, providing the region’s financial institutions with the kind of cheap financing they can no longer get from the market. Among other requirements, Europe’s banks need the money to refinance about a trillion dollars in loans that mature in 2012. Wednesday’s infusion could also help reduce the pressure on beleaguered government borrowers on the periphery of the Continent, most significantly Italy and Spain. Those countries have not been able to directly tap European Central Bank funds, even as investors are increasingly reluctant to finance those countries’ debt by buying their bonds.
Now, though, by lending to commercial banks at such low rates for three years, the central bank might induce them to use some of the newly available money to buy shorter-term government bonds, which have higher yields, or interest rates. Spain’s two-year government bond, for example, is currently yielding 3.64 percent.
Mario Draghi, the central bank’s new president, has resisted calls to stand directly behind debtor governments by buying their bonds as necessary, without limit. But the volume of money pumped into the system on Wednesday suggested that Mr. Draghi was prepared to indirectly support those governments through their nation’s commercial banks.
“This is exactly what happened in the United States with the Fed in 2008,” said Mr. Weinberg, the economist. By buying up bad loans and other impaired assets, and lending money to the banks, government officials in the United States were able to buy time for American banks to strengthen their depleted balance sheets.
But in the current case, European officials confront an even trickier situation. Not only must the banks borrow, but indebted European governments have huge borrowing needs of their own, totaling 1.1 trillion euros ($1.4 trillion) in 2012.
Despite those twin threats, German political leaders have opposed any outright bailout either for the banking system or for troubled government borrowers like Italy and Spain, whose free-spending ways have long irked voters in Germany, Europe’s largest economy and a principal financier of any bailouts.
If it works, the quiet virtue of the European Central Bank’s new lending program will be that it helped buttress banks while easing the pressure on governments — without the appearance of a direct rescue.
Although the program did not take effect until this week, it was announced on Dec. 8 as part of a broader series of European Central Bank efforts to stabilize anxious credit markets. The central bank said it would offer three-year loans — rather than the one-year limit it had previously imposed — and would accept a wider variety of financial assets as collateral, to make it easier for banks to qualify for the loans.
The central bank is accepting the banks’ outstanding loans as security, a measure meant to help smaller community banks that might lack conventional forms of collateral like bonds.
Jack Ewing contributed reporting from Frankfurt.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=a19f5db2d33acd2680d08238118f5983
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