29 March 2016

Reuters: For banks, ECB policy experiment opens north-south divide

As the European Central Bank moves into an unfamiliar world of negative interest rates and incentives to encourage banks to make loans to businesses and consumers, a north-south divide is opening up between eurozone lenders.

In the north, anaemic demand for loans and a financial system already flush with cash mean banks see mostly costs. They must pay the ECB to deposit funds overnight and they have little need for the easy money on offer.

In the south, lenders are keen to take advantage of the loans programme and many are set to get an instant boost to their profit margins when it takes effect in June.

Under the ECB scheme, four-year loans will be offered at an interest rate of zero. Banks lending on more than a prescribed amount of that money to households and companies will get a reduction worth up to the deposit rate - in other words they will be paid to borrow.

The north-south split highlights the challenges of a one-size fits all monetary policy for 19 nations.

The ECB can point to data showing lending in the euro zone is rising at its fastest pace since 2011 to justify its policies. But banks in the likes of Germany say they are penalised by measures that only bring benefits to their counterparts in southern Europe, and warn they could cause cheap money to flow to the wrong parts of the economy.

An ECB spokesperson said the programme's goal was to spur bank lending into the real economy. "It is up to individual banks across the euro area to decide whether to participate."

Commerzbank's chief financial officer Stephan Engels said earlier this month that no bank "north of the Alps" would take the ECB's money, a position exemplified by the experiences of Gemany's fifth biggest bank HypoVereinsbank (HVB) and Spain's Banco de Sabadell.

In Spain, the ECB's loan programme is getting a more positive response. While banks are not expected to sign up for billions of euros of new loans right away, credit demand is growing as Spain recovers from the worst of the euro zone debt crisis, a crisis that left Germany largely unscathed.

The ECB will be able to deploy as much as 1.6 trillion euros worth of funds through its four-year loan scheme. Analysts at Morgan Stanley estimate around 100 billion to 200 billion euros of that will be drawn, mainly by banks in southern Europe.

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