Simbiose financeira

Paresh Nath, «The Khaleej Times»

Governos e bancos, quem salva quem? É o que se pergunta no Buttonwood’s notebook da The Economist:

[…] It is a very tricky issue, as the tortured negoations over the US finance bill have shown. Governments would much rather take actions that shore up the system in general than risk the unpopularity involved in saving individual banks. […]

There is an odd symbiosis at work in that governments need banks to market and indeed buy their debt. But this creates the potential for contagion since a government default on its debt would involve a big loss for the banks. Royal Bank of Scotland estimates that some 2 trillion euros of debt issued by the public and private sectors in Spain, Greece and Portugal is owned by foreign financial institutions; around 1 trillion euros of this is owned directly by banks.

If the banks collapse, governments are in trouble and if government policy collapses, banks are in trouble.