The banks, in a coordinated action intended to restore market confidence, agreed to pump dollars into the European banking system in the first such show of force in more than a year.
The move, coming almost exactly three years after the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers, sharply increased the value of shares in banks heavily exposed to debt from Greece and the other struggling members of the 17-nation euro zone.
The euro, which had been falling in recent days, rebounded, rising roughly 1 percent in European trading Thursday. But whether the central bank action would provide lasting relief remained to be seen.
The European Central Bank said it would allow banks to borrow dollars for up to three months, instead of just for one week as before. The E.C.B. said it was acting in cooperation with the Federal Reserve of the United States, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan and the Swiss National Bank.
It was the first coordinated effort to provide dollars since May 2010, and seemed to go beyond just providing reassurance that European banks would not be cut off by U.S. lenders wary of their financial state. It also echoed a similar move undertaken just a few days after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy nearly brought the world’s financial system to its knees.
The central banks seemed determined to demonstrate that they would not hesitate to deploy their combined weight to keep the European sovereign debt crisis from leading to a collapse of the euro zone.
“They are getting together and acting together,” Christine Lagarde, the president of the International Monetary Fund, said in Washington on Thursday. “To me, that is the most important message.”
But Ms. Lagarde also warned that policy makers had depleted their ammunition since the financial crisis of 2008, and suggested more action was needed.
“We have entered into a dangerous phase of the crisis,” she said. There is still a path to recovery, she said, but it is “a narrow one.”
The central bank action comes as European finance ministers and other key policy makers were gathering in Wroclaw, Poland, for meetings on Friday and Saturday. The U.S. Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, who was scheduled to attend, was expected to urge European officials to act more aggressively to contain the crisis, which has already begun to undercut growth in Europe.
An official forecast warned Thursday that growth in Europe would come “to a virtual standstill” toward the end of the year. The European Commission, the bloc’s executive, cut the growth forecast for the euro area to 0.2 percent for the third quarter and 0.1 percent in the fourth, down from 0.4 percent for both periods. It predicted, though, that Europe would just barely avoid a double-dip recession.
Analysts said they expected Mr. Geithner to press European ministers in Wroclaw to increase the resources available to their bailout fund for the euro zone countries. But among European leaders, and even within the E.C.B., deep disagreements exist over how to prevent the problems of Greece from undermining the common currency.
Members of the euro area are still struggling to ratify an expansion of the bailout fund that they agreed to in July. A further expansion of the fund has raised fears that the increased obligations could hurt some countries’ credit ratings.
“Part of the problem for policy makers is that they are still waiting for last big initiative to get off the ground,” said Peter Westaway, chief European economist in London for Nomura. “We’re all kind of on hold until then.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/business/global/borrowing-costs-stubbornly-high-at-spanish-auction.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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