Sir, with respect to the European Systemic Risk Board —recommendations of pooling, packaging and tranching sovereign bonds from all members of the single currency into synthetic securities you opine: “Having a safe asset proposal in the mix would make it less risky, for example, to introduce a sovereign debt restructuring mechanism or risk weights for banks’ government bond holdings.” “Eurozone ‘safe asset’ is crucial to banking union” May 22.
Once securities with mortgages to the subprime housing sector in the US got a high rating, that allowed the originators of very long, very high interest and very lousily awarded mortgages, to sell these of at very low discount rates, and thereby generate huge immediate profits for them and the packagers. Did this benefit in any way the subprime sector? No! On the contrary… it got much more mortgages that it could reasonably swallow.
In the same vein, let me ask, how are subprime rated nations like Greece to benefit by having its public debt packaged together with higher rated nations like Germany? If its debt is sold off in riskier tranches, then all remains the same. If its debt remains in the safer tranches is there then not a build up of a new crisis?
Sir, what Europe does not need is to try to hide away in some new securities, the regulators’ fatal use of risk weighted capital requirements for banks, that which favored way too much sovereign indebtedness.
What Europe, and the western world need the most is to get rid of that regulation in order to allow banks to again become banks that earn their return on equity by giving loans with calculated risk taking, and not by reducing equity.
A Systemic Risk Board that does not understand the systemic risk bad and intrusive regulations pose is a joke of a Board.
@PerKurowski