July 18, 2015

Does Schäuble know ECB’s Draghi agreed with allowing German banks to leverage over 60 times when lending to Greece?

Sir, Anne-Sylvaine Chassany, James Politi and Peter Spiegel write about “Wolfgang Schäuble, advocating a Greek ‘timeout from the eurozone’ for ‘at least the next five years’ if Athens did not accept the bloc’s exacting conditions for a new bailout”; and of that “Germany puts more onus on stricter rules and control from the centre”. “Fears over German power as Merkel and Schäuble end the good cop, bad cop routine” July 18.

That leads me to question whether Wolfgang Schäuble really knows that rules and control from the centre, in this case by the Basel Committee, allowed German banks, between June 2004 and November 2009, to leverage their capital over 60 times when lending to Greece.

And does Schäuble know that banks in Greece are currently required to hold much less capital when lending to Germany or France, than when lending to Greek SMEs and entrepreneur, so as to help Greece develop the means to be able to at least somewhat serve its monstrous debts?

I ask so because it would seem much more important for Schäuble to request a very long timeout from all ongoing negotiations about the future of Europe, the Eurozone and Greece, of the Basel Committee and of all those who have directly had anything to do with current bank regulations.

And does Schäuble know that Mario Draghi, as a former chair of the Financial Stability Board, is one of those severely compromised bank regulators?