The bank believes that the markets are overreacting to the new variant of Covid and relativizes its impact. The call to have “a little bit of calm” was verbalized yesterday by the president of the Spanish Banking Association (AEB), José María Roldán, during his speech at the ‘IV Banking Forum’ organized by elEconomista in collaboration with Accenture, where he flatly ruled out a systemic problem.
“We are not talking about whether banks are going to have a systemic risk problem in the financial system or whether a bank is going to have a much bigger problem,” he said, convinced that “we are in an infinitely better situation” than at the beginning. of the pandemic. As he recalled, only 8 infections have been confirmed in Europe by the new omicron variant and it has nothing to do with the challenge posed by the declaration of the pandemic in its beginnings when it was thought that it would be “an event of mass extinction” of companies and, even financial institutions, in addition to the “tremendous” impact on human beings, and it has not been such.
“What we are talking about here is whether we are going to have to make more provisions and, therefore, profitability will be worse” or whether the economic recovery “is delayed for a few months,” he added, recognizing that such a scenario could. harm banks if it involves “a delay in the normalization of interest rates.” “The later the rates are normalized, the longer it takes to get the contradiction from interest rates, the more complicated it is,” he admitted.
He wanted to remove iron from the situation, also remembering that, “at this point, both companies and banks, as governments and health authorities, we know how to deal with these problems in a much more selective way than it was in the spring of last year” , without the need to paralyze the economy as happened last year. And he encouraged “getting a little bit of perspective” because the recovery encourages being “hugely optimistic about the future.”
Less optimistic and more concerned, he declared himself about the so-called ‘shadow banking’ with the green and digital revolution, in light of how “pernicious” regulatory arbitrage is and the “harmful effects it can do”, asking authorities and the sector itself to be vigilant, analyze the phenomenon and “see what are the points of weakness”.
He explained that the 2008 crisis “was basically a crisis of the shadow banking system”, since Lehman Brothers “was not a bank, it did not take deposits” but rather a securities company, just as IAG was not a traditional insurer and they were in the germ of the problems.
He warned that shadow banking already moves two trillion euros and warned that the financial system “is transforming with the new digital and green revolution”, while the entry of new operators grows that “we do not understand very well which ones it’s the risks they can carry. “
