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It is the ‘opinion of the European Central Bank’ that the deposit protection scheme is no longer necessary:
‘covered deposits and claims under investor compensation schemes should be replaced by limited discretionary exemptions to be granted by the competent authority in order to retain a degree of flexibility.’
To translate the legalese jargon of the ECB bureaucrats this could mean that the current €100,000 (£85,000) deposit level currently protected in the event of a bail-in may soon be no more.
But worry not fellow savers as the ECB is fully aware of the uproar this may cause so they have been kind enough to propose that:
“…during a transitional period, depositors should have access to an appropriate amount of their covered deposits to cover the cost of living within five working days of a request.”
So that’s a relief, you’ll only need to wait five days for some ‘competent authority’ to deem what is an ‘appropriate amount’ of your own money for you to have access to in order eat, pay bills and get to work.
The above has been taken from an ECB paper published on 8 November 2017 entitled ‘on revisions to the Union crisis management framework’.
It’s 58 pages long, the majority of which are proposed amendments to the Union crisis management framework and the current text of the Capital Requirements Directive (CRD).
It’s pretty boring reading but there are some key snippets which should be raising a few alarms. It is evidence that once again a central bank can keep manipulating situations well beyond the likes of monetary policy. It is also a lesson for savers to diversify their assets in order to reduce their exposure to counterparty risks.
Bail-ins, who are they for?
According to the May 2016 Financial Stability Review, the EU bail-in tool is ‘welcome’ as it:
…contributes to reducing the burden on taxpayers when resolving large, systemic financial institutions and mitigates some of the moral hazard incentives associated with too-big-to-fail institutions.
As we have discussed in the past, we’re confused by the apparent separation between ‘taxpayer’ and those who have put their hard-earned cash into the bank. After all, are they not taxpayers?
This doesn’t matter, believes Matthew C.Klein in the FT who recently argued:
Bail-ins are theoretically preferable because they preserve market discipline without causing undue harm to innocent people.
Ultimately bail-ins are so central banks can keep their merry game of easy money and irresponsibility going. They have been sanctioned because rather than fix and learn from the mess of the bailouts nearly a decade ago, they have just decided to find an even bigger band-aid to patch up the system.
‘Bailouts, by contrast, are unfair and inefficient. Governments tend to do them, however, out of misplaced concern about “preserving the system”. This stokes (justified) resentment that elites care about protecting their friends more than they care about helping regular people.’ Matthew C. Klein
But what about the regular people who have placed their money in the bank, believing they’re safe from another financial crisis? Are they not ‘innocent’ and deserving of protection?
When Klein wrote his latest on bail-ins, it was just over a week before the release of this latest ECB paper. With fairness to Klein at the time of his writing depositors with less than €100,000 in the bank were protected under the terms of the ECB covered deposit rules.
This still seemed absurd to us who thought it questionable that anyone’s money in the bank could suddenly be sanctioned for use to prop up an ailing institution. We have regularly pointed out that just because there is currently a protected level at which deposits will not be pilfered, this could change at any minute.
The latest proposed amendments suggest this is about to happen.
Full article here -
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