The EU is ignoring bank risks in its periphery

A primarily national approach to post-Covid bad debt has cut adrift states such as Greece and Portugal, making future banking crises more likely.

As a new vintage of bad debt ripens, supervisors at the European Central Bank (ECB) are walking a tightrope between allowing banks to argue that everything is alright and spurring policymakers in Brussels into action.

But the European Commission’s strategy for dealing with a post-Covid build-up of bad debt, published in mid-December, falls well short of chief ECB supervisor Andrea Enria’s wishful push for an EU bad bank.

The plan did not even include common funding for national bad banks.

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