Duitse banken voor biljoen aan risicobeleggingen

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'Duitse banken voor biljoen aan risicobeleggingen'

Duitse banken hebben nog voor honderden miljarden euro's aan door de financiële crisis waardeloos geworden beleggingen in de boeken staan. Dat meldde het Duitse weekblad Der Spiegel gisteren op basis van een onderzoek van de Duitse centrale bank onder twintig grote banken.

Duitse banken zouden tot nu toe pas een kwart hebben afgeschreven van de 300 miljard euro aan besmette Amerikaanse beleggingen die ze op hun balansen hebben staan. In totaal zouden de banken 1 biljoen euro aan risicovolle beleggingen bezitten.

Verdere afschrijvingen op deze beleggingen kunnen tot nieuwe miljardenverliezen lijden. Eerder deze week maakte Deutsche Bank, de grootste bank van het land, bekend ongeveer 4,8 miljard euro te hebben verloren in het laatste kwartaal van vorig jaar.

Het ministerie van Financiën wilde de genoemde bedragen niet bevestigen, maar gaf wel aan dat Duitse banken nog "significante hoeveelheden" risicovolle beleggingen op de balans hebben staan.

Ach boeien, de ECB springt wel bij, print maar raak voor een knaak.

Je gaat je dan wel afvragen wat er werkelijk in het vat zit voor ING en consorten.
Option ARM , ALT-A, Prime, Subprime, Jumbo, CDO, CDS whatever.

We gaan met of zonder Europa ook redelijk naar de klote denk ik.

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German state Hypo stake on hold for now - sources

By Matthias Sobolewski and Christian Kraemer
BERLIN/MUNICH, Jan 18 (Reuters) - Plans for a second part-nationalisation of a big German bank this year remained on hold on Sunday as officials worked out details of another rescue package for Hypo Real Estate, sources close to the talks said.
Berlin has been discussing taking a stake in stricken investment bank Hypo Real Estate (HRE) in return for more state aid, but the only accord so far has been on providing additional guarantees as a stopgap, the sources told Reuters.
"A state stake has not been not decided on but is not ruled out at a later date," one politician close to the ruling coalition government in Berlin said.
"New guarantees have been agreed and the rest has been postponed," another source with direct knowledge of the matter said.
The state is already taking a stake of 25 percent plus one share in Commerzbank -- the country's number two lender after Deutsche Bank -- to shore up its balance sheet as it takes over struggling Dresdner Bank.
The sources said the German parliament needed to get involved in the HRE discussions because German law may have to be amended to allow the state to go ahead with its stake purchase plans.
A third source said that, given the complexity of the plan, the Munich-based property lender would get additional borrowing guarantees for now before an "overall solution" to Hypo's woes emerges.
HIT HARD
Hypo Real Estate and Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck declined comment on where the talks stood. Steinbrueck told reporters at an event in Wesel only that the case was in the hands of the Soffin bank rescue fund set up by the state.
Hypo had to be rescued by a consortium of banks and the German government late last year with 50 billion euros of credit and a further 30 billion of state guarantees to borrow more.
Its shares have plunged from 33.63 euros a year ago to as low as 1.85 this month and closed on Friday at 2.08, giving it a market capitalisation below 440 million euros ($583.3 million).
Hypo Real Estate, which has no customer deposits to fall back on, has been hit hard by asset writedowns and problems at its Depfa Bank division, which lends to public-sector borrowers.
Depfa's model of financing long-term loans with short-term borrowing proved a serious problem when debt markets seized up.
HRE Chief Executive Axel Wieandt, who joined from Deutsche Bank last year, is trying to steer the bank back on course by slashing its balance sheet and cutting staff by 40 percent.
Officials are keen to help HRE to avoid sending shock waves through the financial system. The bank is a big player in the German covered bond, or Pfandbrief, market.
Britain, the United States and Ireland have also taken stakes in leading banks by injecting taxpayer funds into finance houses reeling from the global markets and debt crisis.
Major German banks have so far written off only around a quarter of the nearly 300 billion euros in toxic U.S. assets on their books, Der Spiegel magazine reported at the weekend, citing a survey of 20 big lenders.
That means banks face more huge losses as they mark down the value of U.S. assets backed by mortgages and student loans, the magazine said, reporting on a study prepared for the government by the Bundesbank and markets regulator BaFin.
The finance ministry in Berlin assumes that the entire German banking sector is carrying around 1 trillion euros of risky assets on its books, the magazine said.
A spokesman for the finance ministry said it believed banks still had "significant amounts" of risky assets but declined to confirm the figures in the report.
(Additional reporting by Nikola Rotscheroth, Writing by Michael Shields; editing by John Stonestreet)

We hebben dat rapport nooit gezien.

1000 miljard = zowat 66 % van het totale bruto binnenlands product.

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Op zondag 18 januari 2009 22:56 schreef PietjePuk007 het volgende:
Absoluut niet, maar der Spiegel is wel goed in paniek veroorzaken . Dat wilde ik ermee zeggen .

Daar heb ik Der Spiegel niet voor nodig.
Je kunt beter de balans opmaken van wat er nu werkelijk aan de hand is, als je goed tussen de regels leest en nevenbronnen erbij gaat zoeken.
Van de officiële woordvoerders hoef je niks te verwachten (toen niet en nu niet). Die verkopen nog meer onzin dan Der Spiegel. Om de schijn te wekken dat het allemaal nog meevalt en beheersbaar is.
Ondertussen schrijven we wel geschiedenis, omdat er allerlei dingen gebeuren die kompleet buiten het statistisch patroon vallen. Vrijwel geen enkele analist durft nog met cijfers aan te komen. De meeste economische modellen zijn tot pulp verschoten (het pseudo lineaire model ist kaput).
We vluchten met zijn allen in de laatste bubble/line of defense.... staatsobligaties. We parkeren de schuldvraag in de toekomst. En dit zou wel eens zo groot kunnen worden dat het niet meer oplosbaar is.

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FD

De Oeso waarschuwt ook voor het gevaar dat de regels van het Groei en Stabiliteitspact overtreden worden. De belangrijkste bepaling is daar dat overheden geen tekorten op de begroting mogen hebben van meer dan 3% van het bbp.

Nou reken maar dat die overschreden gaan worden in 2009. Maar dat gooien ze liever niet in het nieuws.
Slechts een handvol berichtjes in google news. (beetje raar dat dit nauwelijks ter tafel komt)
ff opgezocht Spanje : het begrotingstekort zou toenemen tot 5,8 procent.

- Nee hoor niks aan de hand

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Mogelijke nationalisatie Hypo Real Bank

De Duitse regering overweegt de noodlijdende hypotheekbank Hypo Real Estate (HRE) tijdelijk te nationaliseren. Dat meldden bronnen binnen de regering zondag. Voor de nationalisatie zou de regering een noodwet willen aannemen die alleen betrekking heeft op HRE.
Service

Bondskanselier Angela Merkel gaf zondag aan een nationalisatie van de bank niet uit te sluiten. "We willen in ieder geval een controlerende meerderheid hebben," aldus Merkel tegen de Duitse televisiezender ZDF. Volgens de bondskanselier is dat de enige optie om ervoor te zorgen dat de bemoeienis van de staat "zo goedkoop mogelijk" blijft.

HRE is het grootste slachtoffer van de financiële crisis in het Duitse bankwezen. In oktober werd de bank van de ondergang gered met een kapitaalinjectie van 50 miljard euro door de Duitse regering en andere banken. Daarnaast ontving het voor 42 miljard euro kredietgaranties.

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Duitsland zet eerste stap nationalisatie Hypo RE


Duitsland gaat een omvangrijk belang nemen in de geplaagde hypotheekbank Hypo Real Estate (RE). Dit liet de bank dit weekeinde weten tegelijk met de aankondiging van een miljardenverlies.

Volgens Hypo RE is de aankoop van het belang van ruim 8 procent een eerste stap naar nationalisatie. De overheid wil de bank, het grootste Duitse slachtoffer van de kredietcrisis, reorganiseren en herfinancieren. Tijdelijke overname is hiervoor volgens Berlijn de beste optie.

Germany's looming credit crunch
A reluctant patient

Europe’s biggest economy has largely escaped the squeeze. Not for much longer


Illustration by S. Kambayashi

ONE of the hardest tasks doctors face is convincing an outwardly well patient that he needs drastic treatment. So too with Germany’s financial system. By most measures, the flow of credit has held up pretty well in Germany, even as it has fallen elsewhere. Yet without painful surgery, there is a real danger that the arteries of finance may soon clog.

There is no obvious need to panic. According to ZEW, a research institute, the total volume of loans outstanding in Germany was almost 3% higher in May than a year earlier, compared with loan growth of under 2% in the rest of the euro area. Surveys of businesses and banks have shown no pervasive tightening of credit. A monthly survey by the IFO institute for economic research at Munich University found that in June more than half of German firms thought credit no harder to come by than usual. A similar study by the German chambers of industry and commerce (DIHK) found that almost two-thirds of firms had experienced no tightening of credit conditions.

Bankers say that they have got tougher but they have still tightened lending standards less markedly than their counterparts in the euro area as a whole. Not even the notoriously pessimistic Bundesbank expected Germany to experience a credit squeeze when it produced its latest forecasts in June. “Overall what you see right now is not a credit crunch,” says Carola Schuler of Moody’s, a rating agency.

Yet many in Germany are increasingly concerned that a looming credit crunch will squeeze lending to the country’s middle-sized firms, throttling any hope of a rebound in growth next year. “There is a real danger for the second half of the year” that credit conditions will tighten sharply, says a senior government official.

The first reason for worry, oddly, is that Germany’s legion of small and medium-sized firms entered this downturn with balance-sheets stuffed with cash. Most say that they are not having trouble raising loans because many have not yet tried. But the sharp contraction in German export orders, with sales in some industries such as machine tools falling by 60%, means that many firms are now burning cash and will soon need to replenish reserves, says Alexandra Böhne of the DIHK.

Being very small will afford some protection. Germany’s locally owned savings banks (or Sparkassen), co-operative banks and small regional banks seem still to be lending furiously to their local clients. Alongside dedicated mortgage banks, such institutions account for about two-thirds of all lending in Germany, although most of this is to (thrifty) households and very small businesses. Being very big may also help. Germany’s largest firms have successfully sold bonds in recent months.

That leaves the Mittelstand, the mid-sized firms that are the backbone of Germany’s export-driven economy, most exposed to a credit squeeze. Sheltering these firms will be tricky because there are many reasons for the expected contraction in lending. The first is that they were keenly courted before the crisis by foreign banks that have since pulled back. Stories abound of clients of these banks desperately knocking on the doors of domestic lenders. “Foreign banks have more or less retreated from Germany,” says Matthias Wissmann of the German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA).

A second reason is that the merger of two of the country’s big domestic banks, Commerzbank and Dresdner Bank, is leading to a sharp withdrawal of credit from the Mittelstand. This is partly because the combined bank is obliged under European state-aid rules to shrink its balance-sheet in return for the help it has received from the government. But it is mainly because many middle-sized companies were clients of both banks. Now that they have merged, credit lines are being amalgamated and cut back.


Underlying these risks is a deeper weakness. German banks are thinly capitalised, with little more than 2% of equity supporting their assets (see chart). Loan losses from a prolonged downturn could quickly deflate that cushion; so too could losses on the banks’ hoard of toxic securities, estimated in some quarters to exceed $1 trillion.

German banks also fear the effects of credit downgrades among their corporate clients. Under Basel 2 rules banks would then have to set aside more capital relative to their assets. The head of corporate banking at one large German bank anticipates an average downgrade of three notches among its clients, which in theory could force the bank to increase its capital reserves by as much as a quarter. Others expect more modest downgrades of one to two notches on average, but few can afford even that sort of deterioration. Many are likely to cut back on lending rather than try to raise more capital.

Such problems are not unique to Germany, but they are being handled in a uniquely short-sighted way. Germany’s bad-bank plan, which passed into law this month, seems determined to deter banks from using it by imposing unnecessarily onerous conditions. Only two banks look likely to take it up. The scheme’s main aim is to protect taxpayers from bearing losses. In that it will be a remarkable success. But it will do little to protect the economy from a prolonged credit squeeze.

Symptomatic of Germany’s reluctance to peer into the state of its banks is its steadfast refusal to force them to conduct stress tests against published criteria. “Why were we reluctant to stress-test the banks?” says an official. “Because we were worried about what we would find.” With doctors like these, pray for the patient.