Monday, May 20, 2013

Portugal bankers warn EU to stop ‘playing with fire’

The heads of Portugal’s biggest banks Millenium BCP and Banco Espirito Santo, have called on European leaders to stop “playing with fire” and alarming depositors in Eurozone economies.
The top bankers expressed concern that the treatment of Cyprus has set a new precedent and as a result nervousness in the region is reaching dangerous levels.

“Leaders need to moderate their language. This could be very bad,” Ricardo Espírito Santo Salgado, chief executive of Banco Espirito Santo, told the Financial Times.

“If someone had designed a plan to hurt the European market, it would be difficult to think of something better.  You can’t keep playing with fire,” President of Millenium BCP, Nuno Amado said, talking about a “Cyprus virus.”



In March Cypriot account holders were told to take a cut on their savings so that their government could qualify for a bailout package from the troika of international lenders.

The impact of the shock decision is still being felt in Portugal and other Eurozone countries, economist Tobias Blattner told RT, stressing that EU leaders need to come up a concrete plan before they meet for an EU Summit in June this year.

“There is a very strong consensus that the Cypriot bail-out was certainly not made in the best way, because it was made in unpredictable way and I think it clearly rose to the uncertainty among investors everywhere in euroarea. So there is a strong consensus there should be a bail-in, which is certainly something good in a long run but it should be according to clear spelled out rules and that essence it’s now very important that leaders in summit in June at the very latest will come out with a very clear bail-in packing order that uninsured depositors will not be hit in any restructuring of banks in euroarea in the future.”

.rt.com
20/5/13
--
-
Related:
 

----

  • BCP e BES alertam para perigo de propagação de "vírus de Chipre" 

Os presidentes do BCP e do BES apelaram aos líderes europeus para que parem de "brincar com o fogo", em entrevista ao Financial Times, alertando para a eventual propagação de um "vírus de Chipre". 



Num artigo publicado esta tarde na edição "online" do jornal britânico, com o título "Bancos portugueses temem vírus de Chipre", o presidente da comissão executiva do Millennium BCP, Nuno Amado, afirma que, "se alguém tivesse desenhado um plano para danificar o mercado europeu, teria sido difícil pensar em algo melhor" do que a solução aplicada em Chipre.
Por seu lado, o presidente da comissão executiva do BES, Ricardo Salgado, considera que "os líderes [políticos] precisam de moderar a sua linguagem", uma vez que "isto pode ser muito mau".
Nuno Amado reconheceu que, na sequência do plano aprovado para Chipre, houve "imenso nervosismo" em Portugal, com o dirigente do BES e uma fonte ligada ao BPI, citada pelo Financial Times, a afirmarem que os bancos sentiram uma série de clientes a querer movimentar dinheiro de depósitos para cofres.
"A maior parte dos clientes em Portugal não confia nas garantias dos depósitos e não tem meios para abrir contas no estrangeiro. Prefere cofres, em vez disso", disse fonte citada como sendo próxima do BPI.
O plano de resgate no valor de 10 mil milhões de euros, aplicado pela "troika" (Banco Central Europeu, Comissão Europeia e Fundo Monetário Internacional), em Chipre, previu um corte nos depósitos acima de 100 mil euros, que inicialmente chegou mesmo a abranger também quantias até esse montante.
http://www.jn.pt/PaginaInicial/Economia/Interior.aspx?content_id=322865

2 comments:

  1. Europe’s zombie banks...Blight of the living dead....Europe’s financial system is in a terrible state, and nothing much is being done about it...

    “PROBABLY the most successful monetary-policy measure undertaken in recent times.” That is Mario Draghi’s self-effacing judgment on the outright monetary transactions (OMT) programme, the promise made by the European Central Bank (ECB) last summer to buy the bonds of struggling euro-area governments. The ECB’s president deserves credit for bringing calm to bond markets. But in reality the situation is still awful, and Europe’s banks are at the heart of the problem.

    The euro-zone economy has contracted for six consecutive quarters. The IMF this week revised its 2013 forecast down again: it expects the euro zone to shrink by 0.6% this year. (Just to rub things in, the fund adjusted its forecasts for Britain upwards.) The outlook in the core euro-zone economies has worsened, thanks in part to a slowdown in China: in May German exports suffered their sharpest fall for two years. But the brunt of the pain is being borne by the peripheral economies.

    Greece is in its sixth straight year of recession; Spain’s unemployment rate stands at almost 27%; Italy’s credit rating was downgraded this week. Benoît Coeuré, an ECB board member, got it right on July 10th when he said that the euro zone “is still engulfed in a severe crisis”. The OMT programme may keep the financial speculators at bay, but pressure can build on the streets as well as in bond yields. Years of joblessness, economic hardship and edicts from creditor countries are straining the political fabric in Portugal and Greece.

    Credit corpses

    Banks are central to Europe’s prospects. The fear, especially in peripheral economies, is a repeat of Japan’s experience in the 1990s, when “zombie” banks staggered along for years, neither healthy enough to lend to firms nor weak enough to collapse. There are the same unvital signs in Europe........http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21581723-europes-financial-system-terrible-state-and-nothing-much-being-done-about-it-blight
    13/7/13

    ReplyDelete
  2. ‘Companies forced to rehire staff dismissed for ‘unsuitability’’ ...

    Six amendments to the Labour Code introduced in 2012 as part of an effort to make the employment market more flexible were thrown out by the Constitutional Court on September 26, which deemed them unconstitutional.

    This means companies, which made staff redundant on the grounds they were no longer suitable for the job – clauses included in the amendments – will have to reinstate the workers.

    However, notes Diário de Notícias, other measures designed to increase Portuguese companies’ competitiveness, such as the cancellation of four bank holidays, were not judged unconstitutional and remain in place.
    http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/news-brief/4181861-companies-forced-rehire-staff-dismissed-unsuitability?xtor=RSS-9
    27/9/13

    ReplyDelete

Only News

Featured Post

US Democratic congresswoman : There is no difference between 'moderate' rebels and al-Qaeda or the ISIS

United States Congresswoman and Democratic Party member Tulsi Gabbard on Wednesday revealed that she held a meeting with Syrian Presiden...

Blog Widget by LinkWithin