Monday, June 01, 2009

Germany needs more than an accounting trick


After the US, the country with the biggest banking problem is probably Germany. Last week the German cabinet adopted a bank rescue plan worth looking at in detail. If you want to know how long the European crisis will last, this might give you the answer.

The Geithner/Summers plan in the US has two fundamental planks – a strategy to ring-fence structured finance products for which there is no market, and a strategy to recapitalise the banking system. Both seem to be based on unrealistically optimistic assumptions about the economic recovery. And both have been criticised sharply, mainly for that reason.

See full Article.