El diario británico Financial Times analiza hoy en un artículo como se gestó la crisis del banco Financiero y de Ahorros (BFA), el banco resultante de la fusión de siete cajas, y repasa el manejo de la banca española en general y particularmente el de las cajas de ahorros, en la burbuja inmobiliaria. Según explica el rotativo británico, las entrevistas con ejecutivos de Bankia, banqueros y otros analistas “muestran que se cometieron errores en todos los lados: por parte de los políticos nacionales y regionales, tanto del PP como del PSOE.
High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d8411cf6-bb89-11e1-90e4-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1yVuOI6Wa
ON THIS STORY
Madrid moves to ease bailout fears
ECB to relax loan rules for Spanish banks
Spain sells 5-year bonds at record yield
In depth Eurozone in crisis
Merkel ambushed by crisis lectures at G20
ON THIS TOPIC
Lex Credit Suisse
Lex Spanish banks
Banks wrestle with tough funding options
Bank gains lift Athens index
IN ANALYSIS
Latin America Bloody but booming
Finance Grinding to a halt
Finance A union to bank on
Australia Mine, all mine
Click to enlarge
“We’ve created a brand – Bankia,” the executive said at the group’s headquarters in northern Madrid, although the confidence he sought to convey was undermined by his evident unease and hasty exit from the room after being summoned to a meeting.
Just over a week later, the centre-right government of Mariano Rajoy, prime minister, intervened to save the bank. The game was up for an ill-fated behemoth that began life with more than 4,000 branches and nearly 25,000 employees.
Rodrigo Rato, a former Spanish finance minister and ex-managing director of the International Monetary Fund who became Bankia’s executive chairman, was obliged to resign. The government announced a partial nationalisation at an estimated cost of up to €10bn.
Then came the most shocking blow of all: on May 25, José Ignacio Goirigolzarri, an experienced banker brought out of retirement to replace Mr Rato and rescue Bankia, said it needed twice as much to clean out bad loans. He requested €19bn in new emergency capital, on top of earlier state aid of €4.5bn. Bankia restated its 2011 results to reflect a net loss of €3bn instead of the reported net profit of €309m.
Created in January last year, and floated on the Madrid stock exchange six months later, Bankia and its parent Banco Financiero de Ahorros (BFA) were touted by Mr Rato as the biggest bank in Spain in terms of domestic business, with €341bn in loans and deposits, and a 10 per cent market share. Yet by last month, less than 18 months later, Bankia had become the biggest banking catastrophe in Spain’s history.
The Bankia debacle, however, is not merely a stain on the reputation of Spanish banking. Mr Goirigolzarri made his appeal for capital at a moment when Madrid was finding it increasingly hard to raise money with sovereign bonds. That triggered the decision two weeks later by Mr Rajoy to swallow his pride and appeal to the EU for a bailout of up to €100bn to help recapitalise Spanish banks.
And the failure of that Spanish “mini-bailout” to soothe the markets could yet prompt the need for a full bailout of Spain, along the lines of the earlier rescues of Greece, Ireland and Portugal – and so imperil the 17-nation eurozone.
“What detonated the latest phase of this crisis was the situation at a big financial institution and its enormous capital requirements,” Angel Ron, chairman ofBanco Popular, a listed Spanish commercial bank, said earlier this month in a reference to Bankia. “That was the tipping point,” agreed one analyst.
Trouble in the regions
The origins of the institution that did so much damage to Spain are in the country’s regions, which have gained considerable powers in recent years. Bankia’s components – Caja Madrid, Bancaja from Valencia and smaller savings banks from the Canary Islands, Catalonia, Rioja and the towns of Avila and Segovia in central Spain – were typical of the cajas that accounted for half of Spain’s banking system by assets before the crisis began. They began as regional businesses and were in most cases closely connected to politicians in the areas where they operated, so that Caja Madrid and Bancaja were influenced and run by the Popular party now in government.
Above all, the cajas were exposed to property, having financed the homebuilding bonanza in the decade up to 2007 and lent freely to developers, construction companies and housebuyers.
Since 2009, other cajas and groups of cajas have failed too. They were seized by the state and sold or simply nationalised – in Castilla La Mancha, Andalucia, Valencia, Galicia and Catalonia. Bankia’s fall was worse, however, because not only did it exemplify all the political and managerial weaknesses of the Spanish financial system, it was also so large as to be “systemically important”. Its failure would threaten the entire banking network and it was therefore “too big to fail”.
Interviews with Bankia executives, other bankers and analysts show mistakes were made on all sides: by national and regional politicians of both the PP and the Socialist party, stock market and bank regulators, the previous and current managers of the bank and its component cajas, by investment bankers, bank analysts and by an insufficiently inquisitive media. While it is easy to make such judgments with the benefit of hindsight, it is also true Spanish commercial bankers have long been scathing in private about the property lending follies of the cajas, especially around Valencia where Bancaja was based.
Madrid was only slightly better. During Spain’s housing boom, mortgage lending at Caja Madrid, the largest of the savings banks that formed Bankia, started to grow so quickly that, by 2007, some executives were trying to slow things down. After its mortgage book expanded by 25 per cent in 2006, Carlos Stilianopoulos, Caja Madrid’s then head of capital markets and later Bankia’s chief financial officer, said: “We don’t want to grow this fast. We are a savings bank so we don’t have to keep shareholders happy. We prefer to have a solid institution.”
At the same time, warnings from abroad about the overheating of Spain’s property market were dismissed. “Perhaps in other countries this pace of growth would be seen as a bubble,” he told Euromoney. “But not in Spain.”
Caja Madrid continued to grow and moved into marketing exotic financial instruments to foreign investors, such as bundled packages of loans.
“Fifty per cent of the banking sector in Spain – which was the cajas – did not have the corporate governance or the management skills to withstand a crisis,” says one of the many investment bankers involved in the July 2011 initial public offering of Bankia.
After 2008 – when the Spanish property bubble started to deflate, Lehman Brothers collapsed and the eurozone’s sovereign debt crisis began – the Bank of Spain and the socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero launched a programme of “soft mergers” between cajas to improve efficiency. At first, however, the reforms were far from brutal. Managers responsible for failing cajas were often either retained or sent into retirement with multimillion euro compensation packages.
A problem goes public
As the crisis deepened, Spanish, European and international regulators increased capital requirements. For Bankia, a fateful decision was the introduction of a Spanish rule that forced banks to have a minimum core tier one capital ratio of 10 per cent of their assets – unless they were listed, in which case they were allowed 8 per cent. The idea was to save taxpayers’ money but it pushed Bankia into an IPO that most agree now should never have happened in the way it did.
“I find it very hard to believe that those who created the Bankia structure, and who were working on the listing were not aware of the problems of the bank,” said one adviser involved in Bankia’s nationalisation.
Ahead of its listing, Bankia hired Lazard, where Mr Rato had worked after leaving the IMF, to co-ordinate and advise on the sale of shares, later taking on a group of international investment banks – led by Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan and UBS – to market the deal to international investors. Lazard in Spain declined to comment.
In spite of this army of financial support, investment bankers who worked on the deal said there was negligible interest from foreign institutions. They could think of only one fund manager in London who was interested in buying a few shares.
“If I was an investment banker I would never have done the Bankia IPO – I would never have been able to recommend this to a client,” says a UK-based fund manager who declined to buy.
The process of selling Bankia abroad was described by some of those involved as “chaotic” and “mayhem”, with numerous banks struggling to get their views heard over each other, and being forced to filter negative feedback from potential investors back to Lazard and another core adviser, STJ Advisors.
Several advisers reported back to Bankia that it needed to raise more money, particularly given the large gap between loans and deposits, its €32.9bn of real estate exposure and its need to repay its high-interest €4.5bn loan from the state Fund for Orderly Bank Restructuring.
A crucial factor holding Bankia back from agreeing to sell more of its equity, giving it a greater buffer to withstand losses, was that it was impossible to do so without diluting control of the savings banks that formed Bankia to below 50
#10:
#2 Entonces podemos decir que el PP quebró España ¿no? (lo digo mirando a las personas de carne y hueso del consejo de Bankia).
#6:
Debería de decir el banco Pepero que quebró España
#2:
Un banco por sí solo no quiebra una mierda, hay responsables de carne y hueso.
High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d8411cf6-bb89-11e1-90e4-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1yVuOI6Wa
ON THIS STORY
Madrid moves to ease bailout fears
ECB to relax loan rules for Spanish banks
Spain sells 5-year bonds at record yield
In depth Eurozone in crisis
Merkel ambushed by crisis lectures at G20
ON THIS TOPIC
Lex Credit Suisse
Lex Spanish banks
Banks wrestle with tough funding options
Bank gains lift Athens index
IN ANALYSIS
Latin America Bloody but booming
Finance Grinding to a halt
Finance A union to bank on
Australia Mine, all mine
Click to enlarge
“We’ve created a brand – Bankia,” the executive said at the group’s headquarters in northern Madrid, although the confidence he sought to convey was undermined by his evident unease and hasty exit from the room after being summoned to a meeting.
Just over a week later, the centre-right government of Mariano Rajoy, prime minister, intervened to save the bank. The game was up for an ill-fated behemoth that began life with more than 4,000 branches and nearly 25,000 employees.
Rodrigo Rato, a former Spanish finance minister and ex-managing director of the International Monetary Fund who became Bankia’s executive chairman, was obliged to resign. The government announced a partial nationalisation at an estimated cost of up to €10bn.
Then came the most shocking blow of all: on May 25, José Ignacio Goirigolzarri, an experienced banker brought out of retirement to replace Mr Rato and rescue Bankia, said it needed twice as much to clean out bad loans. He requested €19bn in new emergency capital, on top of earlier state aid of €4.5bn. Bankia restated its 2011 results to reflect a net loss of €3bn instead of the reported net profit of €309m.
Created in January last year, and floated on the Madrid stock exchange six months later, Bankia and its parent Banco Financiero de Ahorros (BFA) were touted by Mr Rato as the biggest bank in Spain in terms of domestic business, with €341bn in loans and deposits, and a 10 per cent market share. Yet by last month, less than 18 months later, Bankia had become the biggest banking catastrophe in Spain’s history.
The Bankia debacle, however, is not merely a stain on the reputation of Spanish banking. Mr Goirigolzarri made his appeal for capital at a moment when Madrid was finding it increasingly hard to raise money with sovereign bonds. That triggered the decision two weeks later by Mr Rajoy to swallow his pride and appeal to the EU for a bailout of up to €100bn to help recapitalise Spanish banks.
And the failure of that Spanish “mini-bailout” to soothe the markets could yet prompt the need for a full bailout of Spain, along the lines of the earlier rescues of Greece, Ireland and Portugal – and so imperil the 17-nation eurozone.
“What detonated the latest phase of this crisis was the situation at a big financial institution and its enormous capital requirements,” Angel Ron, chairman ofBanco Popular, a listed Spanish commercial bank, said earlier this month in a reference to Bankia. “That was the tipping point,” agreed one analyst.
Trouble in the regions
The origins of the institution that did so much damage to Spain are in the country’s regions, which have gained considerable powers in recent years. Bankia’s components – Caja Madrid, Bancaja from Valencia and smaller savings banks from the Canary Islands, Catalonia, Rioja and the towns of Avila and Segovia in central Spain – were typical of the cajas that accounted for half of Spain’s banking system by assets before the crisis began. They began as regional businesses and were in most cases closely connected to politicians in the areas where they operated, so that Caja Madrid and Bancaja were influenced and run by the Popular party now in government.
Above all, the cajas were exposed to property, having financed the homebuilding bonanza in the decade up to 2007 and lent freely to developers, construction companies and housebuyers.
Since 2009, other cajas and groups of cajas have failed too. They were seized by the state and sold or simply nationalised – in Castilla La Mancha, Andalucia, Valencia, Galicia and Catalonia. Bankia’s fall was worse, however, because not only did it exemplify all the political and managerial weaknesses of the Spanish financial system, it was also so large as to be “systemically important”. Its failure would threaten the entire banking network and it was therefore “too big to fail”.
Interviews with Bankia executives, other bankers and analysts show mistakes were made on all sides: by national and regional politicians of both the PP and the Socialist party, stock market and bank regulators, the previous and current managers of the bank and its component cajas, by investment bankers, bank analysts and by an insufficiently inquisitive media. While it is easy to make such judgments with the benefit of hindsight, it is also true Spanish commercial bankers have long been scathing in private about the property lending follies of the cajas, especially around Valencia where Bancaja was based.
Madrid was only slightly better. During Spain’s housing boom, mortgage lending at Caja Madrid, the largest of the savings banks that formed Bankia, started to grow so quickly that, by 2007, some executives were trying to slow things down. After its mortgage book expanded by 25 per cent in 2006, Carlos Stilianopoulos, Caja Madrid’s then head of capital markets and later Bankia’s chief financial officer, said: “We don’t want to grow this fast. We are a savings bank so we don’t have to keep shareholders happy. We prefer to have a solid institution.”
At the same time, warnings from abroad about the overheating of Spain’s property market were dismissed. “Perhaps in other countries this pace of growth would be seen as a bubble,” he told Euromoney. “But not in Spain.”
Caja Madrid continued to grow and moved into marketing exotic financial instruments to foreign investors, such as bundled packages of loans.
“Fifty per cent of the banking sector in Spain – which was the cajas – did not have the corporate governance or the management skills to withstand a crisis,” says one of the many investment bankers involved in the July 2011 initial public offering of Bankia.
After 2008 – when the Spanish property bubble started to deflate, Lehman Brothers collapsed and the eurozone’s sovereign debt crisis began – the Bank of Spain and the socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero launched a programme of “soft mergers” between cajas to improve efficiency. At first, however, the reforms were far from brutal. Managers responsible for failing cajas were often either retained or sent into retirement with multimillion euro compensation packages.
A problem goes public
As the crisis deepened, Spanish, European and international regulators increased capital requirements. For Bankia, a fateful decision was the introduction of a Spanish rule that forced banks to have a minimum core tier one capital ratio of 10 per cent of their assets – unless they were listed, in which case they were allowed 8 per cent. The idea was to save taxpayers’ money but it pushed Bankia into an IPO that most agree now should never have happened in the way it did.
“I find it very hard to believe that those who created the Bankia structure, and who were working on the listing were not aware of the problems of the bank,” said one adviser involved in Bankia’s nationalisation.
Ahead of its listing, Bankia hired Lazard, where Mr Rato had worked after leaving the IMF, to co-ordinate and advise on the sale of shares, later taking on a group of international investment banks – led by Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan and UBS – to market the deal to international investors. Lazard in Spain declined to comment.
In spite of this army of financial support, investment bankers who worked on the deal said there was negligible interest from foreign institutions. They could think of only one fund manager in London who was interested in buying a few shares.
“If I was an investment banker I would never have done the Bankia IPO – I would never have been able to recommend this to a client,” says a UK-based fund manager who declined to buy.
The process of selling Bankia abroad was described by some of those involved as “chaotic” and “mayhem”, with numerous banks struggling to get their views heard over each other, and being forced to filter negative feedback from potential investors back to Lazard and another core adviser, STJ Advisors.
Several advisers reported back to Bankia that it needed to raise more money, particularly given the large gap between loans and deposits, its €32.9bn of real estate exposure and its need to repay its high-interest €4.5bn loan from the state Fund for Orderly Bank Restructuring.
A crucial factor holding Bankia back from agreeing to sell more of its equity, giving it a greater buffer to withstand losses, was that it was impossible to do so without diluting control of the savings banks that formed Bankia to below 50
#4 Se trata de una muy buena crítica y análisis de datos, no es un simple titular. Es importante que se sepa en el ámbito internacional quienes son los causantes de muchos de los males de la situación económica de nuestro país. Nombres y apellidos.
Mírate si puedes el texto completo en #1.
#5 Lo de los causantes si que es importante que se sepa, y como he dicho, el artículo es bueno (no había visto que el comentario uno continuaba). Pero la mala prensa hace que se genere desconfianza y eso nos perjudica a todos realmente, nos guste o no nos guste el sistema, el gobierno, el rescate... Yo por mi parte a estos responsables les barría rápido, eso lo tengo claro, y por supuesto que se tiene que saber quiénes son, pero sea como sea me parece importante salir de esta, porque la realidad es que estamos cada vez peor y yo no sé si las críticas del este priódico, tan constantes y tan difundidas ayudan a mejorar un poco la situación.
#7 No tengo tan claro que nos perjudique. Yo lo siento pero no soy de los que opinan que hay que salir de esta como sea y seguir como estábamos. Hay cosas que tienen que cambiar y para que algunas cosas cambien realmente creo que habrá que sufrir.
La pregunta es ¿hasta que punto deseamos que cambie esto? ¿qué estamos dispuestos a perder?. Yo creo que los cambios son difíciles y deberíamos aceptarlo.
#8 Vamos a ver, yo pienso que esto tiene que cambiar radicalmente, pero yo creo que el cambio necesario es un cambio de sistema a nivel global más que nacional, para empezar se debería recuperar la soberanía de los pueblos frente al poder finaciero y de las multinacionales, para ello, una de las cosas que pienso fundamentales es el stop al liberalismo absoluto en que vivimos, más intervención, hay ciertas prácticas que deberían ser prohibidas. Hasta aquí mi opinión. Pero, hasta que punto es esto posible? Por otro lado, me vale una crítica de un periódico nacido del capitalismo radical?
Por otra parte, la realidad es que, aparte del cambio, es necesario mantenerse uno mismo, mantener a la familia, etc, y cualquier cosa que perjudique esto, al menos hay que mirarla con lupa.
#8 Bueno, la situación actual es que los bancos han hecho unos negocios ruinosos, como empresas no tienen futuro y nuestros políticos están dedicando el dinero de nuestros impuestos a mantenerlos con vida.
Por otro lado ha cambiado la estructura de los impuestos. Se han mantenido IRPF e IVA y ha bajado mucho el impuesto de sociedades y patrimonio. Así que los ricos pagan muchos menos impuestos y por eso la sociedad no tiene el dinero que tenía en 2007 para funcionar.
Para mi el cambio está claro: los negocios ruinosos no se mantiene porque no tiene sentido hacerlo y los que pagan los impuestos deben ser todos, no solo los asalariados y clases populares.
Lo de que debemos sufrir, no coincido. Los adinerados no sufren porque se les haga volver a pagar los impuestos que pagaban años atrás. Los bancos en la ruina no sufren porque los cierres.
Si me dices que los ciudadanos de a pie deben sufrir, te digo que no: ni ellos han causado la crisis, ni eso soluciona nada, ni es justo.
#43 Yo tampoco creo que la crisis la tengamos que pagar los trabajadores y clases menos favorecidas. No me refería a eso. Lo que quería resaltar es que para poder cambiar verdaderamente un sistema tan podrido como este, a lo mejor, no es posible si no se "rompe" en ciertos aspectos. Pero creo que los cambios transcendentales, están directamente relacionados con una inestabilidad económica y política que muchos de nosotros dudo que estemos dispuestos a atravesar. Quizás por miedo, "comodidad", o imposibilidad de plantear alternativas nuevas y eficaces que cambien la esencia económica que tanto nos aprieta y, cada vez más, ahoga.
#1: Has copiado un texto privado. Eres un piratazo, la #CyberPolice va a retrotracearte y las consecuencias nunca serán las mismas. La has dun-gofeado-arriba.
PD: Gracias por copiarlo. Hay cosas que casi sería mejor ignorar y vivir una falsa felicidad.
#14 A lo mejor nuestra actitud más responsable sería no difundir nunca opiniones de los medios que deciden esconderlas. Ni "consumirlas". No por ellos, sino por nosotros.
#10 ¡Pues claro! ... ese era el plan que tenia el PP hundir a Zapatero a cualquier coste "ya lo arreglaremos nosotros" se le escapo a lenguaraz Montoro cuando le dieron el aviso y el plan lo desarrollaron muy bien en Madrid metieron en el banco a todos los familiares y amiguetes con sueldos multimillonarios y a los compañeros prestamos a coste cero y asi lo han dejado.
#10#12#19
En el PP hace una faccion habituada ha querer hacerse los dueños de España a costa de lo que sea, los liberales; por lo tanto, no lo descarto.
#10#12#19 Sí, fue el PP solito.
“El gran error fue cuando regresó del roadshow internacional y se vio que no había interés. Deberían haber paralizado el proceso” señala Íñigo Vega, experto en banca. Sin embargo, según FT, el Gobierno de José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero presionó a las grandes empresas españolas para que apoyaran la salida a Bolsa en aras del “interés nacional”.
Según explica el rotativo británico, las entrevistas con ejecutivos de Bankia, banqueros y otros analistas “muestran que se cometieron errores en todos los lados: por parte de los políticos nacionales y regionales, tanto del PP como del PSOE.
Han conseguido que hablemos de Bankia y mi abuela no se entera porque parece que la cosa no va con ella. ¿Porqué no hablamos de Cajamadrid y de Bancaja? ¿Porque no hablamos de la C.A. de Madrid y de la C.A. Valenciana?
Y no vale salirse por Castilla la Mancha para marear: ¡Cada palo que aguante su vela!.
Sería muy importante conocer exactamente dónde se encuentran los agujeros. Está claro que la burbuja inmobiliaria es el principal, pero dentro de esta gran bolsa también hay muchísimos créditos sin devolver de empresas quebradas a las que se les concedieron créditos cuanto menos "dudosos". Empresas con responsables amigos de los responsables bankeros de las cajas o, lo que es lo mismo, de políticos reconvertidos... Esperemos que los informes de las dos consultoras (que han cobrado un milloncete cada una) hayan sido capaces de desmenuzar esos datos. Esperemos, además, que los responsables políticos tengan las suficientes criadillas de publicarlo para exigir responsabilidades...
“Me resulta muy difícil creer que los que crearon la estructura de Bankia, y que estaban trabajando en su salida a Bolsa no eran conscientes de los problemas del banco”, señala al FT un asesor que participa en la nacionalización de Bankia.
precisamente porque eran muy conscientes de los problemas diseñaron esa salida a bolsa como una vía de recapitalización, más claro, agua.
España ya estaba hundida antes del asunto de Bankia. En el PP lo saben bien, pues hicieron todo lo posible para hundirla y llegar así al poder; el mismo Montoro lo dijo.
Lo mejor es que justo después de lo de Bankia en la Cope hicieron un programa hablando de los mitovos del posible rescate, para ir más atrás y echar la culpa a ZP...
Yo diría, que estos del financial times, que parecen otro de los actores que opinan y marcan la marcha en el mundo, deberían empezar a mirar en su propia casa, porque fue ahí, que parece que se nos ha olvidado, donde se empezaron todas esas prácticas engañosas e irresponsables que detonaron todo esto.
No digo que no puedan tener razón, pero estaría bien que la mala prensa se la metieran por el culo.
Comentarios
El texto íntegro del financial times porque se necesita acceso para acceder a la noticia en: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d8411cf6-bb89-11e1-90e4-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1yVqUBRlK
High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d8411cf6-bb89-11e1-90e4-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1yVuOI6Wa
The bank that broke Spain
By Victor Mallet and Miles Johnson
Bankia has imperilled Madrid’s finances and driven it to seek a bailout
©Eyevine
“A very solid group with more than 10m customers.”
That was how a senior Bankia executive described the big Spanish bank on the last Friday of April.
Amid rumours of grave financial problems, he assured two sceptical journalists that the task of integrating the seven regional savings banks in the group was largely complete, and that plans to cut costs, reduce debt and minimise dependence on fickle wholesale funding markets were well advanced.
More
ON THIS STORY
Madrid moves to ease bailout fears
ECB to relax loan rules for Spanish banks
Spain sells 5-year bonds at record yield
In depth Eurozone in crisis
Merkel ambushed by crisis lectures at G20
ON THIS TOPIC
Lex Credit Suisse
Lex Spanish banks
Banks wrestle with tough funding options
Bank gains lift Athens index
IN ANALYSIS
Latin America Bloody but booming
Finance Grinding to a halt
Finance A union to bank on
Australia Mine, all mine
Click to enlarge
“We’ve created a brand – Bankia,” the executive said at the group’s headquarters in northern Madrid, although the confidence he sought to convey was undermined by his evident unease and hasty exit from the room after being summoned to a meeting.
Just over a week later, the centre-right government of Mariano Rajoy, prime minister, intervened to save the bank. The game was up for an ill-fated behemoth that began life with more than 4,000 branches and nearly 25,000 employees.
Rodrigo Rato, a former Spanish finance minister and ex-managing director of the International Monetary Fund who became Bankia’s executive chairman, was obliged to resign. The government announced a partial nationalisation at an estimated cost of up to €10bn.
Then came the most shocking blow of all: on May 25, José Ignacio Goirigolzarri, an experienced banker brought out of retirement to replace Mr Rato and rescue Bankia, said it needed twice as much to clean out bad loans. He requested €19bn in new emergency capital, on top of earlier state aid of €4.5bn. Bankia restated its 2011 results to reflect a net loss of €3bn instead of the reported net profit of €309m.
Created in January last year, and floated on the Madrid stock exchange six months later, Bankia and its parent Banco Financiero de Ahorros (BFA) were touted by Mr Rato as the biggest bank in Spain in terms of domestic business, with €341bn in loans and deposits, and a 10 per cent market share. Yet by last month, less than 18 months later, Bankia had become the biggest banking catastrophe in Spain’s history.
The Bankia debacle, however, is not merely a stain on the reputation of Spanish banking. Mr Goirigolzarri made his appeal for capital at a moment when Madrid was finding it increasingly hard to raise money with sovereign bonds. That triggered the decision two weeks later by Mr Rajoy to swallow his pride and appeal to the EU for a bailout of up to €100bn to help recapitalise Spanish banks.
And the failure of that Spanish “mini-bailout” to soothe the markets could yet prompt the need for a full bailout of Spain, along the lines of the earlier rescues of Greece, Ireland and Portugal – and so imperil the 17-nation eurozone.
“What detonated the latest phase of this crisis was the situation at a big financial institution and its enormous capital requirements,” Angel Ron, chairman ofBanco Popular, a listed Spanish commercial bank, said earlier this month in a reference to Bankia. “That was the tipping point,” agreed one analyst.
Trouble in the regions
The origins of the institution that did so much damage to Spain are in the country’s regions, which have gained considerable powers in recent years. Bankia’s components – Caja Madrid, Bancaja from Valencia and smaller savings banks from the Canary Islands, Catalonia, Rioja and the towns of Avila and Segovia in central Spain – were typical of the cajas that accounted for half of Spain’s banking system by assets before the crisis began. They began as regional businesses and were in most cases closely connected to politicians in the areas where they operated, so that Caja Madrid and Bancaja were influenced and run by the Popular party now in government.
Above all, the cajas were exposed to property, having financed the homebuilding bonanza in the decade up to 2007 and lent freely to developers, construction companies and housebuyers.
Since 2009, other cajas and groups of cajas have failed too. They were seized by the state and sold or simply nationalised – in Castilla La Mancha, Andalucia, Valencia, Galicia and Catalonia. Bankia’s fall was worse, however, because not only did it exemplify all the political and managerial weaknesses of the Spanish financial system, it was also so large as to be “systemically important”. Its failure would threaten the entire banking network and it was therefore “too big to fail”.
Interviews with Bankia executives, other bankers and analysts show mistakes were made on all sides: by national and regional politicians of both the PP and the Socialist party, stock market and bank regulators, the previous and current managers of the bank and its component cajas, by investment bankers, bank analysts and by an insufficiently inquisitive media. While it is easy to make such judgments with the benefit of hindsight, it is also true Spanish commercial bankers have long been scathing in private about the property lending follies of the cajas, especially around Valencia where Bancaja was based.
Madrid was only slightly better. During Spain’s housing boom, mortgage lending at Caja Madrid, the largest of the savings banks that formed Bankia, started to grow so quickly that, by 2007, some executives were trying to slow things down. After its mortgage book expanded by 25 per cent in 2006, Carlos Stilianopoulos, Caja Madrid’s then head of capital markets and later Bankia’s chief financial officer, said: “We don’t want to grow this fast. We are a savings bank so we don’t have to keep shareholders happy. We prefer to have a solid institution.”
At the same time, warnings from abroad about the overheating of Spain’s property market were dismissed. “Perhaps in other countries this pace of growth would be seen as a bubble,” he told Euromoney. “But not in Spain.”
Caja Madrid continued to grow and moved into marketing exotic financial instruments to foreign investors, such as bundled packages of loans.
“Fifty per cent of the banking sector in Spain – which was the cajas – did not have the corporate governance or the management skills to withstand a crisis,” says one of the many investment bankers involved in the July 2011 initial public offering of Bankia.
After 2008 – when the Spanish property bubble started to deflate, Lehman Brothers collapsed and the eurozone’s sovereign debt crisis began – the Bank of Spain and the socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero launched a programme of “soft mergers” between cajas to improve efficiency. At first, however, the reforms were far from brutal. Managers responsible for failing cajas were often either retained or sent into retirement with multimillion euro compensation packages.
A problem goes public
As the crisis deepened, Spanish, European and international regulators increased capital requirements. For Bankia, a fateful decision was the introduction of a Spanish rule that forced banks to have a minimum core tier one capital ratio of 10 per cent of their assets – unless they were listed, in which case they were allowed 8 per cent. The idea was to save taxpayers’ money but it pushed Bankia into an IPO that most agree now should never have happened in the way it did.
“I find it very hard to believe that those who created the Bankia structure, and who were working on the listing were not aware of the problems of the bank,” said one adviser involved in Bankia’s nationalisation.
Ahead of its listing, Bankia hired Lazard, where Mr Rato had worked after leaving the IMF, to co-ordinate and advise on the sale of shares, later taking on a group of international investment banks – led by Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan and UBS – to market the deal to international investors. Lazard in Spain declined to comment.
In spite of this army of financial support, investment bankers who worked on the deal said there was negligible interest from foreign institutions. They could think of only one fund manager in London who was interested in buying a few shares.
“If I was an investment banker I would never have done the Bankia IPO – I would never have been able to recommend this to a client,” says a UK-based fund manager who declined to buy.
The process of selling Bankia abroad was described by some of those involved as “chaotic” and “mayhem”, with numerous banks struggling to get their views heard over each other, and being forced to filter negative feedback from potential investors back to Lazard and another core adviser, STJ Advisors.
Several advisers reported back to Bankia that it needed to raise more money, particularly given the large gap between loans and deposits, its €32.9bn of real estate exposure and its need to repay its high-interest €4.5bn loan from the state Fund for Orderly Bank Restructuring.
A crucial factor holding Bankia back from agreeing to sell more of its equity, giving it a greater buffer to withstand losses, was that it was impossible to do so without diluting control of the savings banks that formed Bankia to below 50
#4 Se trata de una muy buena crítica y análisis de datos, no es un simple titular. Es importante que se sepa en el ámbito internacional quienes son los causantes de muchos de los males de la situación económica de nuestro país. Nombres y apellidos.
Mírate si puedes el texto completo en #1.
#5 Lo de los causantes si que es importante que se sepa, y como he dicho, el artículo es bueno (no había visto que el comentario uno continuaba). Pero la mala prensa hace que se genere desconfianza y eso nos perjudica a todos realmente, nos guste o no nos guste el sistema, el gobierno, el rescate... Yo por mi parte a estos responsables les barría rápido, eso lo tengo claro, y por supuesto que se tiene que saber quiénes son, pero sea como sea me parece importante salir de esta, porque la realidad es que estamos cada vez peor y yo no sé si las críticas del este priódico, tan constantes y tan difundidas ayudan a mejorar un poco la situación.
#7 No tengo tan claro que nos perjudique. Yo lo siento pero no soy de los que opinan que hay que salir de esta como sea y seguir como estábamos. Hay cosas que tienen que cambiar y para que algunas cosas cambien realmente creo que habrá que sufrir.
La pregunta es ¿hasta que punto deseamos que cambie esto? ¿qué estamos dispuestos a perder?. Yo creo que los cambios son difíciles y deberíamos aceptarlo.
#8 Vamos a ver, yo pienso que esto tiene que cambiar radicalmente, pero yo creo que el cambio necesario es un cambio de sistema a nivel global más que nacional, para empezar se debería recuperar la soberanía de los pueblos frente al poder finaciero y de las multinacionales, para ello, una de las cosas que pienso fundamentales es el stop al liberalismo absoluto en que vivimos, más intervención, hay ciertas prácticas que deberían ser prohibidas. Hasta aquí mi opinión. Pero, hasta que punto es esto posible? Por otro lado, me vale una crítica de un periódico nacido del capitalismo radical?
Por otra parte, la realidad es que, aparte del cambio, es necesario mantenerse uno mismo, mantener a la familia, etc, y cualquier cosa que perjudique esto, al menos hay que mirarla con lupa.
#8 Bueno, la situación actual es que los bancos han hecho unos negocios ruinosos, como empresas no tienen futuro y nuestros políticos están dedicando el dinero de nuestros impuestos a mantenerlos con vida.
Por otro lado ha cambiado la estructura de los impuestos. Se han mantenido IRPF e IVA y ha bajado mucho el impuesto de sociedades y patrimonio. Así que los ricos pagan muchos menos impuestos y por eso la sociedad no tiene el dinero que tenía en 2007 para funcionar.
Para mi el cambio está claro: los negocios ruinosos no se mantiene porque no tiene sentido hacerlo y los que pagan los impuestos deben ser todos, no solo los asalariados y clases populares.
Lo de que debemos sufrir, no coincido. Los adinerados no sufren porque se les haga volver a pagar los impuestos que pagaban años atrás. Los bancos en la ruina no sufren porque los cierres.
Si me dices que los ciudadanos de a pie deben sufrir, te digo que no: ni ellos han causado la crisis, ni eso soluciona nada, ni es justo.
#43 Yo tampoco creo que la crisis la tengamos que pagar los trabajadores y clases menos favorecidas. No me refería a eso. Lo que quería resaltar es que para poder cambiar verdaderamente un sistema tan podrido como este, a lo mejor, no es posible si no se "rompe" en ciertos aspectos. Pero creo que los cambios transcendentales, están directamente relacionados con una inestabilidad económica y política que muchos de nosotros dudo que estemos dispuestos a atravesar. Quizás por miedo, "comodidad", o imposibilidad de plantear alternativas nuevas y eficaces que cambien la esencia económica que tanto nos aprieta y, cada vez más, ahoga.
#47 Hombre, si lo que queremos es mejorar las cosas, el plan no puede ser intentar empeorarlas.
Vamos, digo yo.
#1: Has copiado un texto privado. Eres un piratazo, la #CyberPolice va a retrotracearte y las consecuencias nunca serán las mismas. La has dun-gofeado-arriba.
PD: Gracias por copiarlo. Hay cosas que casi sería mejor ignorar y vivir una falsa felicidad.
#14 A lo mejor nuestra actitud más responsable sería no difundir nunca opiniones de los medios que deciden esconderlas. Ni "consumirlas". No por ellos, sino por nosotros.
Debería de decir el banco Pepero que quebró España
#6 Lo dices como si en Bankia no hubiesen metido cargos a dedo de PSOE y IU a dedo! Me gusta más el enfoque de #36
Por cierto, los ingleses estan deseando que caiga el euro.
#6 ¿ Quiebran el país, te quitan dinero y bienestar durante épocas y lo reduces a un tema partidista ?
Lo que hace falta es justicia. Los responsables deben ser investigados y, tras juicio, encarcelados.
Sean del partido que sean.
Un banco por sí solo no quiebra una mierda, hay responsables de carne y hueso.
#2 ¿No me digas? Échale un vistazo a esto a ver si te dice algo
http://15mparato.wordpress.com/
#2 Entonces podemos decir que el PP quebró España ¿no? (lo digo mirando a las personas de carne y hueso del consejo de Bankia).
#10 ¡Pues claro! ... ese era el plan que tenia el PP hundir a Zapatero a cualquier coste "ya lo arreglaremos nosotros" se le escapo a lenguaraz Montoro cuando le dieron el aviso y el plan lo desarrollaron muy bien en Madrid metieron en el banco a todos los familiares y amiguetes con sueldos multimillonarios y a los compañeros prestamos a coste cero y asi lo han dejado.
#10 #12 #19
En el PP hace una faccion habituada ha querer hacerse los dueños de España a costa de lo que sea, los liberales; por lo tanto, no lo descarto.
#10 #12 #19 Sí, fue el PP solito.
“El gran error fue cuando regresó del roadshow internacional y se vio que no había interés. Deberían haber paralizado el proceso” señala Íñigo Vega, experto en banca. Sin embargo, según FT, el Gobierno de José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero presionó a las grandes empresas españolas para que apoyaran la salida a Bolsa en aras del “interés nacional”.
#10 Y no te equivocas BANKIA, La MEGALADRONERA del Partido Popular http://www.lasmalaslenguas.es/2012/05/31/bankia-megaladronera-pp/
#10 Con el beneplácito de su partido gemelo, el PSOE.
#10 Podemos decirlo, si. No veo porque habría que quitarles ese mérito.
#2 Hay responsables de carne y hueso que ya debían estar camino de la cárcel.
Y aun asi se les concedera todas las ayudas que pidan y nadie ira a la prision.
Según explica el rotativo británico, las entrevistas con ejecutivos de Bankia, banqueros y otros analistas “muestran que se cometieron errores en todos los lados: por parte de los políticos nacionales y regionales, tanto del PP como del PSOE.
Si claro, errores...
#26 yep, "se cometieron errores", no dice que fueran equivocaciones.
¿ahora a decir la verdad se le llama "duro ataque"?
Cuando se enteren de que los que gestionaban Bankia son los que están ahora en el poder...
Los que esperamos ver el fin del estado español agradecemos al PP la gran labor realizada para este fin.
#15 te voto positivo por tu buen comentario pero por supuesto por tu nick.
pd: estuve con tu homonima hace un tiempo y aun me acuerdo de ella
Han conseguido que hablemos de Bankia y mi abuela no se entera porque parece que la cosa no va con ella. ¿Porqué no hablamos de Cajamadrid y de Bancaja? ¿Porque no hablamos de la C.A. de Madrid y de la C.A. Valenciana?
Y no vale salirse por Castilla la Mancha para marear: ¡Cada palo que aguante su vela!.
Yo diría "Los políticos que quebraron España"
Y pensar que Aznar estuvo a un tris de nombrar a Rodrigo Rato como su sucesor. Al pensar en ello, le cojo cariño a Rajoy y todo.
Sería muy importante conocer exactamente dónde se encuentran los agujeros. Está claro que la burbuja inmobiliaria es el principal, pero dentro de esta gran bolsa también hay muchísimos créditos sin devolver de empresas quebradas a las que se les concedieron créditos cuanto menos "dudosos". Empresas con responsables amigos de los responsables bankeros de las cajas o, lo que es lo mismo, de políticos reconvertidos... Esperemos que los informes de las dos consultoras (que han cobrado un milloncete cada una) hayan sido capaces de desmenuzar esos datos. Esperemos, además, que los responsables políticos tengan las suficientes criadillas de publicarlo para exigir responsabilidades...
Sin problemas, volvera a pasar.
#0 y el vídeo?
#20 Lo mismo me pregunto... :\
#20 Tienes razón. Suelo estar muy atento a ese tipo de cosas. Pido disculpas por el error.
Duro no, crudo.
Dónde esta Rato? En Brasil?
“Me resulta muy difícil creer que los que crearon la estructura de Bankia, y que estaban trabajando en su salida a Bolsa no eran conscientes de los problemas del banco”, señala al FT un asesor que participa en la nacionalización de Bankia.
precisamente porque eran muy conscientes de los problemas diseñaron esa salida a bolsa como una vía de recapitalización, más claro, agua.
Puede parecer duro verlo escrito en un periódico extranjero.
Pero lo grave es que tiene toda la razón.
Y lo segundo más grave es que estas cosas no se digan en España. Que tengamos que recurrir a los medios internacionales para verlo escrito.
A ninguno les va a pasar nada, ni a estos ni a Urmangarin
Es una verguenza totallllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll
España ya estaba hundida antes del asunto de Bankia. En el PP lo saben bien, pues hicieron todo lo posible para hundirla y llegar así al poder; el mismo Montoro lo dijo.
Otro titulo: "El banco que quebró la Comunidad Valenciana"
Lo mejor es que justo después de lo de Bankia en la Cope hicieron un programa hablando de los mitovos del posible rescate, para ir más atrás y echar la culpa a ZP...
Yo diría, que estos del financial times, que parecen otro de los actores que opinan y marcan la marcha en el mundo, deberían empezar a mirar en su propia casa, porque fue ahí, que parece que se nos ha olvidado, donde se empezaron todas esas prácticas engañosas e irresponsables que detonaron todo esto.
No digo que no puedan tener razón, pero estaría bien que la mala prensa se la metieran por el culo.