Word: germane
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...some countries are making extraordinary efforts and other countries aren't, with the hope that somehow the countries that are making those important steps lift everybody up," Obama said last week, in a prime-time press conference. But so far, European leaders have resisted the call for more stimulus. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said she does not want to be bogged down by "artificial discussions" of fiscal stimulus, and like many of her peers would prefer to focus on fashioning a new regulatory structure to make sure the excesses and abuses that precipitated the crisis don't threaten...
...German banks have an estimated $265 billion to $400 billion in bad debt on their books. Put another way: that's as much as 12% of German GDP. The U.S. bad-bank plans calls for purchasing up to $1 trillion in toxic debt, equivalent to 6.8% of U.S. GDP. German banks have about $550 billion in cash reserves. So, it's not hard to figure out what would happen to the real economy if the banks are left on their own to work through loan failure of this magnitude. "Germany has not succeeded yet in getting control of the financial...
...banks, the finance ministry and SoFFin, the federal bank-stabilization fund, could produce a viable concept for a bad bank before the G-20 meeting. According to Weber, Germany would not create a central bad bank and it would not buy the toxic assets from the banks. Instead, German banks could split each bank into a good bank and a bad bank, allowing the banks to move the bad debt into their bad bank and in return receive fresh capital from the government for their good bank. The government remains skeptical of the plan but still has put no alternative...
...Federation of German Banks, which represents the main private-sector banks, has proposed something along these lines already. Rather than calling it a bad bank the banks call it a "mobilization fund." Each bank would park its toxic assets in an account with the government. This way the assets would be off the banks' books but each security would still be associated with its original owner rather than pooled together. "The mobilization fund is not about burdening the taxpayer with all the risks," Klaus-Peter Müller, head of the banking federation, told reporters...
...decade after the Washington summit at which Clinton, Blair and then-German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder sat down to sketch out a common world view, their successors have a prevailing wind at their backs. Yet, here in Vina del Mar, they seemed hesitant to seize "the progressive moment...