There is no doubt that without the bank’s swift intervention, the implications of the liquidity squeeze on the wider economy would have been far, far worse.
But at what point does the market’s reliance on ECB repo funding develop into moral hazard? Are banks, as has been suggested, using the facility to fund new origination? Are they taking advantage of the single rating requirement to offer up weaker collateral to the ECB? What is the unwind scenario of the €200 billion of ABS that has been engineered and retained to tap the ECB window? And, most important, how can...
