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Mikl posted:Fuckin' hell. RIP Monte Paschi, RIP bondholders, and rip Italian people's confidence in banks (if it wasn't dead already). Don't worry, you stop caring after the third.
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Dec 27, 2016 05:06
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Parliamentary hearings will be fun though and everyone will take turns chaos dunking on the bankers,based on our experience.
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Dec 27, 2016 13:15
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Dawncloack posted:Pretty low, I'd say, they are giving this bank money, so it will pay its obligations to other banks. I'm more worried about the TBTB banks
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Dec 27, 2016 13:28
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His Divine Shadow posted:I'm more worried about the TBTB banks lol if you think that the Lords of Austerity won't suddenly find an unlimited amount of Euros to bail out the big French and/or German banks.
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Dec 27, 2016 13:37
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ChainsawCharlie posted:Parliamentary hearings will be fun though and everyone will take turns chaos dunking on the bankers,based on our experience. Yes, they take turns alternating between "chaos dunking" on the bankers and throwing fistfuls of money at them.
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Dec 27, 2016 13:41
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Chaos dunking cash into their open maws.
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Dec 27, 2016 13:55
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throw to first drat IT posted:So, what are the chances that this will spread to other Italian/EU banks?
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Dec 27, 2016 14:47
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MeLKoR posted:Yes, they take turns alternating between "chaos dunking" on the bankers and throwing fistfuls of money at them. I understand this but everytime they show their faces in a economic fórum or whatever everyone just shits on them and they absolutely cant stand it. Small v ictories ya know
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Dec 27, 2016 17:38
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LemonDrizzle posted:There are other Italian banks with similar problems, although none are as big as MPS. It's unlikely to spread outside Italy (as I understand it) because the structure and practices of the Italian banking system aren't really replicated elsewhere in Europe. Hey, would you give us some details on this one? what makes them so different? Thanks!
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Dec 28, 2016 00:09
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Dawncloack posted:Hey, would you give us some details on this one? what makes them so different? Thanks!
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Dec 28, 2016 12:35
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Are the Italian banks run by the mafia or something? Why are they so lovely?
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Dec 28, 2016 19:02
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doverhog posted:Are the Italian banks run by the mafia or something? Why are they so lovely? The Italian economy basically hasn't grown since the year 2000, and Italy has in no way even started recovering from the global financial crisis of 2008. So loans that went bad during that time because borrowers got in trouble stayed bad instead of recovering. Italian banks are lovely as a result of the general and structural shittiness of Italy, though obviously some banks are probably shittily run too.
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Dec 28, 2016 19:11
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Hello, you are about to experience the Finnish politics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsO4Egq83fs Thank you and good night.
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Dec 28, 2016 22:11
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I'm not sure what's being spoken by the narrator but I'm assuming the diaper man is meant to represent refugees.
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Dec 28, 2016 22:52
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Tesseraction posted:I'm not sure what's being spoken by the narrator but I'm assuming the diaper man is meant to represent refugees. The video is "arguing" against teaching Swedish in Finnish schools.
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Dec 28, 2016 22:52
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Rappaport posted:The video is "arguing" against teaching Swedish in Finnish schools. Really they should stop teaching Finnish and admit the language has failed. When the name of your language is basically "bog-gledibook" you have to go back to the ol' drawing board. That your Swedish neighbour kindly lent you.
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Dec 28, 2016 22:57
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Tesseraction posted:Really they should stop teaching Finnish and admit the language has failed. When the name of your language is basically "bog-gledibook" you have to go back to the ol' drawing board. That your Swedish neighbour kindly lent you. I know it's in the spirit of Europol that I now present some offensive strawman about the English language and, say, your colonial past to defend my moon language, but it's Christmastime 
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Dec 28, 2016 23:00
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Finland at least have properly their own thing going on. When is the rest of Western/Northern Europe going to give up on their corrupted, bastard variants on German and get with the program re: Hochdeutsch?
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Dec 28, 2016 23:09
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Rappaport posted:I know it's in the spirit of Europol that I now present some offensive strawman about the English language and, say, your colonial past to defend my moon language, but it's Christmastime
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Dec 28, 2016 23:12
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LemonDrizzle posted:I should qualify this by saying that I'm not a banker or any kind of expert in banking, I just follow some on twitter and read what they have to say every now and again. With that said, as I understand it, there are two big differences. First, the Italian banking system has much larger stocks of bad debt than most European banking systems. Second, any attempt to resolve the banks' problems would have to be done via the European bail-in process, which would mean that small time domestic savers (who were mis-sold bonds by the banks) would potentially lose their life savings, which is obviously going to be politically toxic. In other European countries, banks haven't been selling their own bonds to retail customers (i.e. everyday people) and so they could be bailed-in without causing a major political shitstorm. Ah, I now see what I mean. Thanks! I wonder why exactly Italy has that many NPLs. From what I read there has been a change in the reporting rules and that means that they have become more apparent, but even if they weren't counted the bad loans were there. As for the bonds, selling complex financial instruments to retail customers by ways of telling them they are fixed rent and supersafe has happened in Spain too. One court in Spain even decided that an illiteratte (and not just financially) old woman should have known what she was buying. Hell, if anything the fact that it is politically toxic might mean something might be done about the misselling. In Spain the Conservative party felt secure enough in their majority that they threw those retail savers under a convoy of buses.
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Dec 28, 2016 23:12
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LemonDrizzle posted:The fundamental difference between English and Finnish is that whenever English encounters an unfamiliar language, the first thing it does is bash the silly fucker over the head, drag it into the nearest dark alley, and nick all of its good words before it comes to. Finnish does much the same sort of thing except instead of stealing entire words it just grabs random letters and shoves them into its own words any old how. Consequently, English ends up shamelessly strutting around decorating itself with words like "schadenfreude" and "entrepot" whereas the average Finnish sentence looks like what you'd expect to get if an epileptic had a fit on his keyboard while wrestling an angry cat. 
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Dec 28, 2016 23:31
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Tesseraction posted:Really they should stop teaching Finnish and admit the language has failed. When the name of your language is basically "bog-gledibook" you have to go back to the ol' drawing board. That your Swedish neighbour kindly lent you. Now check your privilege you anglosaxon toff. Granted, english is lingua franca and german is the language of austerity and shouting RAUS! SCHNELL! but after that getting saddled with YET another country-cousin danish is bit too much.
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Dec 29, 2016 01:52
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Dawncloack posted:I wonder why exactly Italy has that many NPLs. From what I read there has been a change in the reporting rules and that means that they have become more apparent, but even if they weren't counted the bad loans were there. To the best of my knowledge, it's also due to the nature of loans that are failing/non-performing. For most countries in the 2008 crisis it was household debt and mortgages that were hit hardest, but since these are quite liquid and recoverable classes it wasn't too complicated for banks to sort out how much money they should write off and work to move forwards from there. In Italy, much like in Greece (and Germany, but they haven't had roughly 0 growth for 15 years), these classes weren't hit so hard, partly because some tools are used quite a bit less -mortgages in particular- and partly because there was less speculation or over-extension by banks. However, banks had to remain competitive in their loaning (revenue-generating) activity when compared to US/UK/etc. banks; so they were more open to providing loans to businesses, especially small and medium-sized businesses. In absolute terms, this isn't any worse than loaning to households. In some respects it's even more secure becasue it's easier to get a clear view of the business's financials vs a household. However, the downside is that the loaned amounts are often larger, and it's harder to wind down if the business goes bankrupt. Because of the aforementioned 0 growth, Italian businesses have been suffering badly. Banks worked with the businesses to delay payments, re-finance their loan conditions, and do what they could to both keep the business going, and the loan off the NPL pile. Now, this 'wait and see' strategy worked well for Germany. Banks didn't write off too much loan value in 2008-2009, meaning they didn't have to recapitalise too agressively, and as the economy got going again they were able to recover the loans, often with some interest. However, Italy didn't get any growth, for reasons that are beyond the scope of this answer, so rather than being able to bounce back, they just kept on kicking the can down the road, whilst seeing the NPL pile grow, and capitalisation needs grow. The thing is that since it wasn't apparent that the banks needed to recapitalise to reach lower multiples (capital held by the bank under book value of loans), they continued to put new loans on the market. For Germany, this was a good thing, since the loans were good which helped to smooth out the bump even further. But for Italy it was the opposite that has happened, with more loans that can't be serviced being added to the pile. Of course, this means that the capitalisation ratio is just getting worse and worse, which is scaring investors away from putting more money into the bank's coffers, but EU rules say that if the banks can't get the money on the open market, then the state can only recapitalise the bank if the current owners/debtors of the bank also put in their money (usually by reducing the book value of their share/debt). Which brings us back to the 2000s, when US/UK banks were riding the household debt and mortgage bubble, and Italian banks were pressed by their owners to show growth of their own, which they achieved by pushing strongly sales of their own unsecured bonds as investment vehicles to households in lieu of credit. Because Italian tax rules at the time for people buying this type of bond was quite attractive, and under the sales pressure banks applied, Italian banks managed to get a considerable number of households interested. Households own about 30% of Italian bank bonds, which is very high for such a large economy. And these bonds put them in the first line to lose money now that the bank needs to be recapitalised, since they're pretty much always the lowest grade the bank was emitting. I don't think anyone was consciously trying to dick each other (more than usual, that is). But now businesses are failing and unlike UK/US banks, it's really difficult for Italian banks to sort out the mess of dealing with recovering anything on the back of these non performing loans. Business assets can often be specific and not have much demand for them is the industry is in a rut, and even before that there's the whole question of waiting for the administrator to sort through the various debt claims, counter-claims and so forth, so Italian banks are also not even sure of how much they can recover in many cases, nor when they'll see the proceeds of the sale. Well, that's what I've understood at least. I'm sure there are some finer points I'm missing (and perhaps I've got some of the major points back to front). Meh.
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Dec 29, 2016 02:31
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Shazback posted:[good poo poo] Thanks for this. Super informative. Is the 0 growth because the national government can't stop cutting it's own limbs off over and over every two years?
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Dec 29, 2016 06:41
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androo posted:Thanks for this. Super informative. I don't think this is really the case (also, it's more like Italy had a new government every year - since WWII, they've had 64 governments). For most of the postwar period, Italy was run by the Christian Democrats in different alliances with smaller parties. Just because the exact composition of the government changed all the time does not mean this system was necessarily unstable. And Italy during this time did develop into a major industrial power. The system was however exceptionally corrupt, and it fell apart because of the Clean Hands judicial investigations of the 1990s. Unfortunately, this only meant that one set of crooks was replaced by another, as for whatever reason the Italians then elected Silvio Berlusconi four times in the last twenty years. The low growth rate is more because of longstanding structural problems, of which you can find a decent overview here. And obviously joining the euro didn't help, and neither did austerity policies, but if you're as indebted as Italy you're probably nearing the limit to to how much more you can deficit-spend.
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Dec 29, 2016 11:21
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Thank you Shazback!
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Dec 29, 2016 18:01
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http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38458583quote:A Finnish court has sentenced the former head of Helsinki's anti-drugs police to 10 years in prison for drug-smuggling and other offences. Probably the funniest things to happen in Finland for a while. The head of the Helsinki drug police teaming up with nazi bikers to smuggle weed and other stuff and among other things, burying a duffel bag with a 100k in his flower garden. 
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Dec 29, 2016 19:56
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Do European nationalists ever get upset about the weird Indian cult aggressively colonizing their diamond markets or are they just glad to have someone to take over for the Jews once they're finally driven back to Israel? http://qz.com/459422/how-indian-families-took-over-the-antwerp-diamond-trade-from-orthodox-jews/ How Indian families took over the Antwerp diamond trade from orthodox Jews posted:In the popular European imagination, diamonds remain inextricably linked with the Jews. When I’d told a group of Julio’s colleagues in Brussels my plans for a story on the Indian community’s role in the trade, they’d expressed surprise. Diamonds? Wasn’t that a Jewish fiefdom?
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Dec 30, 2016 01:22
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Squalid posted:Do European nationalists ever get upset about the weird Indian cult aggressively colonizing their diamond markets or are they just glad to have someone to take over for the Jews once they're finally driven back to Israel? The answer to "Are European nationalists ever upset about X" is basically always yes. Even (maybe in particular) about European nationalism.
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Dec 30, 2016 01:28
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Some Indian woman posted:In the popular European imagination, diamonds remain inextricably linked with the Jews.
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Dec 30, 2016 07:50
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I don't think that's true at all, except for a few die-hards. Usually when Jews get brought up by 'European nationalists' these days, it's in the context of how they need to be protected from the muslims. Regardless of what they might think of them behind closed doors, there is just no political gain whatsoever to be had from scapegoating them. As far as this specific story is concerned, I don't think anyone in Antwerp really gives a poo poo or even knows that the (obscure) diamond industry is becoming more and more Indian, let alone in the rest of Flanders.
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Dec 30, 2016 08:05
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Phlegmish posted:I don't think that's true at all, except for a few die-hards. Usually when Jews get brought up by 'European nationalists' these days, it's in the context of how they need to be protected from the muslims. Regardless of what they might think of them behind closed doors, there is just no political gain whatsoever to be had from scapegoating them.
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Dec 30, 2016 08:22
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Well, I was more referring to Private Speech's post. Antwerp's diamond industry has indeed traditionally been in Hasidic Jewish hands, but in other countries I don't know if that's the case. She was probably just generalizing.
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Dec 30, 2016 08:28
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Phlegmish posted:Well, I was more referring to Private Speech's post. Antwerp's diamond industry has indeed traditionally been in Hasidic Jewish hands, but in other countries I don't know if that's the case. She was probably just generalizing.
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Dec 30, 2016 08:52
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Citation needed. Someone tell her that's gold. Diamonds are synonymous with western colonialism.
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Dec 30, 2016 09:03
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Regarde Aduck posted:Someone tell her that's gold.
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Dec 30, 2016 09:10
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Speaking of Jews, I tried to watch Yvan Attal's The Jews. It's probably the worst thing I've ever seen and incredibly bad taste. I lasted 30 minutes.....can you do better?
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Dec 30, 2016 09:17
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I only associate Jews with all the diamonds in the world because of Snatch. I blame Hollywood
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Dec 30, 2016 14:33
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Why are these Indian families a 'cult'?
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Dec 30, 2016 14:40
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Tesseraction posted:Why are these Indian families a 'cult'?
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Dec 30, 2016 14:43
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