Europe's Dishonest "Stress Test" for Banks

The Wall Street Journal correctly pulls aside the veil and exposes the dubious gimmick that European politicians used to declare that banks are reasonably health. To put it bluntly, they assumed no government would ever default, which really means that the stress test was a fraud or German taxpayers are now on the chopping block to bail out every other nation.

Two months ago, credit markets in Europe nearly went off the rails over concern about what a sovereign debt default in Greece would do to the Continent's banks. After last night's release of the result of a Europe-wide stress test, we're not much wiser. The EU's committee of national bank regulators repeatedly says that its stress test includes a "sovereign shock" scenario. But crucially, "a sovereign default was not included in the exercise," in the dry language of the committee's summary report. This means the test only looked at government debt held in trading portfolios, while ignoring any government bonds listed as held to maturity. Earlier this month, regulators made it clear that they opposed testing the consequences of a sovereign debt default on European bank balance sheets. The German magazine Der Speigel reported that regulators felt including sovereign default in the tests might imply that the EU's €750 billion ($960 billion) bailout fund wasn't guaranteed to work. In other words, bank regulators in Europe think Greece, Spain, Portugal and the rest are too big to fail. Germany and France will always save them in the end, so the consequences of a default don't even need to be considered.