The EU Bailout Oligarchy Issues A Report About Itself
December 22, 2012Source: Wolf Richter, Testosterone Pit.com
On Friday before Christmas when nobody was paying attention, when people were elbowing their way through department stores or heading out for vacation, the European Commission issued its report on bank bailouts in the European Union—a dry document with mind-boggling numbers that left out the most important fact.
The misnamed “2012 State Aid Scoreboard“ provided a sobering number—misnamed because it covered the period from October 2008 through December 2011, and not 2012. It had taken the Commission bureaucracy a year to add up all the numbers, and there were a lot of them to add up. Turns out, the amount that the governments of all 27 EU states had handed to their banks to prop them up or bail them out amounted to €1.616 trillion ($2.1 trillion).
It does not include the bank bailouts of 2012, such as Spain, whose banks are getting their first installment of €39 billion, or Greece [The Price Of “Collective Trauma”: Greece At The Brink of Civil War], or tiny Cyprus whose banks alone require at least €10 billion [The Bailout Of Russian “Black Money” In Cyprus]. Nor does it include any of the ECB’s bailout operations.
Nevertheless, €1.616 trillion is a big number: 13% of European Union GDP. Of that, €1.174 trillion was for “liquidity support,” and €442 billion was for “bank solvency” support, such as recapitalizations and dumping “impaired assets.”
The usual suspects? Um....
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