Judgment daze 迷茫的裁决

“IT’S an analyst’s wet dream,” says one banker of the European stress tests announced on July 23rd. If financial detail is what turns you on, then the exercise delivered in style with hundreds of pages of information on 91 banks’ solvency and their exposures to the bonds of under-siege governments in the euro zone. As a piece of organisation, if not quite a triumph, it was an impressive feat. But whether all that new disclosure or the tests’ conclusion—that seven European banks need a piffling euro 3.5 billion ($4.5 billion) of new capital—help the banks escape their funding problems remains to be seen.

“这是分析家的一场梦遗。” 其中一位接受欧洲压力测试的银行家在7月23日表示道。如果你对金融消息感兴趣，那么这次检验出炉的一份有着几百页内容涉及91家银行偿付能力，及对其所持有的那些身处困境的欧元区国家债券曝光的报告，将带给你别样的风格。作为一个整体，若不是一次颇具分量的胜利，这次就不会是一场了不起的壮举。但是所有公开的信息或是测试结果——7家欧洲银行需要的一笔不到35亿欧元（合45亿美元）的新资金——能否能帮助银行摆脱资金问题还有待观察。

The initial signs were modestly encouraging. Credit-default-swap (CDS) spreads, a proxy for banks’ borrowing costs, improved slightly across Europe, according to Markit, a research firm. Banks’ share prices rose too, although that had as much to do with the news on July 27th that the new Basel 3 rules on the sector’s capital and funding would be watered down. Still, wide differences remain. Five of the seven banks to fail were Spanish savings banks (see article): many of the cajas still face CDS spreads many times those of safer firms. On July 26th Bankinter, a midsized Spanish commercial bank that just scraped through the tests, paid a record spread of 240 basis points to issue a mortgage-backed bond.

最初的征兆是要适度地刺激。根据一家叫Markit的研究公司的信息，代表着银行贷款成本的指数——欧洲的信用违约掉期（CDS）的收益差稍有提高。银行业的股价也有所上涨，尽管这与7月27日一条关于新巴塞尔协定的第三条对资本和资金的问题淡化的新闻有很大的关系。然而，巨大的差异依旧存在。在七家问题银行的中五家属于西班牙（见文章）：多家cajas式的银行仍然面临CDS的收益差比几倍于那些更安全的银行。7月26日，西班牙一家勉强通过测试的中型商业银行，西班牙洲际银行（Bankinter）破纪录地付出了240个基准点来发行抵押债券。

The hope is that funding costs fall further as the results of the tests sink in. After all, America’s stress tests in May 2009 were criticised at first but gradually came to be viewed more favourably. That depends on three things: whether the tests were a really serious examination of banks’ solvency; whether the disclosure eases investors’ mistrust; and whether the sheer quantity of debt European banks need to refinance overwhelms all else.

测试结果的公布是希望资金的成本能进一步下降。毕竟，虽然在2009年5月份美国压力测试刚开始时饱受指责，但之后却逐渐地被认为有着诸多好处。这取决于三个方面：是否测试在真正严肃地检查银行的偿付能力；公开的信息是否能消除投资者的不信任；以及已经急剧增加的欧洲银行债务是否需要再一轮的庞大融资。

On solvency, the tests are on thin ground. Critics pointed to their generous bar for capital adequacy—a Tier-1 ratio of 6%. Much was also made of the discrepancies between the assumptions used in different countries. Austria’s “adverse” scenario assumes that commercial-property prices still rise in 2011 and Greece’s assumes only a 2% decline. That compares with a 5-10% drop in most big countries and a 30% drop in Spain.

对于偿付能力，测试却鲜有提到。批评者指出，他们对资本充足率的限定是如此的宽容——一级资本率只需占到6%。而对于不同国家的假设条件也存在较大的差异。对奥地利 “不利”的假设条件是其商品房的价格在2011年依旧上涨，而对希腊的假设是其下降2%。相比之下，多数大国的跌幅率在5-6%左右，而西班牙的跌幅却达到了30%。

There are huge differences in the forecasts of banks’ underlying profits, which play a big role in absorbing bad debts. This was the issue the Committee of European Banking Supervisors (CEBS), a quango of national regulators that co-ordinated the tests, had the most argy-bargy with banks about. Some observers are also annoyed that banks took a haircut only on sovereign debt held in their trading books, rather than in their banking books too. In practice this did not make a huge difference. Huw van Steenis, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, reckons that extending haircuts to the banking book would have meant a euro 18 billion capital gap across the 91 banks—compared with total Tier-1 capital of over euro 1.1 trillion.

在吸收坏账上可以发挥很大作用的银行潜在利润方面，其预测存在着巨大的差异。作为测试的协调方，有着半官方背景的监管机构——欧洲银行监管委员会（CEBS）已经和银行业就这个问题讨论过多次。一些观察家迁怒于银行持有的主权债券在他们交易账目上只是换了个名头，在其银行账本上亦是如此。实际上，这并没有导致什么较大的变化。摩根士丹利（Morgan Stanley）的分析师Huw van Steenis估计，作为对银行账本名目动手脚的延伸，将意味着91家银行会180亿欧元的资本亏空，相比之下总的一级资本超过了1万1千亿欧元。更多信息请访问：http://www.24en.com/

The easiest way to capture the overall severity of the tests is to look at the capital they assume banks eat up. In aggregate banks were projected to face write-downs equivalent to 4.5% of their risk-adjusted assets over two years, which would be almost exactly offset by underlying profits. America’s tests in 2009 assumed an almost identical level of underlying profits but write-downs of almost 8% of risk-adjusted assets over two years, resulting in a far bigger net hit of three percentage points to banks’ capital ratios. The Bank of England reckons that in previous crises in Japan and Scandinavia the average bank’s net losses typically ate up about 4% of its capital. CEBS retorts that it was testing for a double-dip recession, not economic Armageddon, and for jitters in some countries’ sovereign-bond markets rather than a break-up of the euro zone.

最简单的方法通过狠抓测试整体上的严格性，来评判银行假定吸收的资本。整个银行业预计在两年内将面对冲减其风险调整后资产的4.5%，这几乎将抵消全部的潜在利润。2009年美国进行的压力测试假设的潜在利润几乎都在同一水平上，但是在两年内冲减将近风险调整后资产的8%，这会导致高于3个百分点来命中银行的资本比率。英格兰银行（The Bank of England）估计，在先前的危机中，日本和斯堪的纳维亚半岛（包括挪威、瑞典和芬兰）的银行的平均净亏损通常抵消了其4%的资本金。CEBS反驳道，这次测试是为避免第二次衰退和对一些国家主权债务的疑虑而进行，并不是对经济的末日审判，或是分裂欧元区。

Spain did impose a tougher solvency test. Its secretary of state for economic affairs, José Manuel Campa, says it was determined to rebuild investor confidence. The exercise assumed new impairments in 2010 and 2011 equivalent to 7% of risk-adjusted assets—well above the level assumed by other big countries. That was partly offset by Spanish banks’ higher-than-average profitability. Overall the tests found Spain’s banks needed euro 16 billion of extra capital, almost all of which the state had agreed to inject before the tests.

西班牙对于银行的偿付能力强制进行一次更加严格的测试。其经济事务国务秘书José Manuel Campa表示，西班牙决心重新树立投资者的信心。这次测试假设在2010和2011年度出现相当于风险调整后资产的7%的新亏损，这个数字远高于其他大国假设的水平。由此也部分抵消了西班牙银行高于平均水平的盈利能力。总体上，测试使西班牙银行业得以筹集所需的160亿欧元的额外资金，而在测试之前几乎所有的国家都同意了向其注资。

If investors are unlikely radically to change their view of Europe’s banks, might they feel more comfortable now that they know more about the risks they face? Although almost all banks did disclose their holdings of riskier government bonds it is questionable whether this really helps investors capture their exposure to a collapse in Greece or other countries. According to the Bank for International Settlements, public-sector bonds account for only about 15% of European banks’ exposure to Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. Where the tests do help hugely, however, is by what they did not reveal. All the big cross-border banks were subject to bottom-up examinations, according to CEBS. None was revealed to be holding unexpected ordnance that could blow up in investors’ faces.

如果在根本上不可能改变投资者对欧洲银行业的看法的话，既然其知道将会面临更多的风险，他们会觉得更加自在吗？尽管几乎所有的银行都公布了其所持的具有高风险性的政府债券，但是能否真正帮助投资者俘获对希腊和其他衰败国家的信心还是个问题。根据国际清算银行（the Bank for International Settlements）的消息，公共部门的债券仅仅占欧洲银行所公布希腊、爱尔兰、葡萄牙和西班牙的15%。然而，测试所到来的巨大帮助他们却没有透露。据CEBS称，所有的跨国银行都得受到自上而下的检查。然而，却没揭发出一个家持有着可以袭击投资者武器的银行。

A modest boost to confidence is therefore the tests’ most likely outcome. But that will probably not be enough to open up funding markets to the degree the banks require. Funding is now a “uniquely European problem,” says Simon Samuels of Barclays Capital. With its giant banking system and high loan-to-deposit ratios, Europe’s refinancing needs far exceed those of any other banking system (see chart). Thanks to a strong sovereign, German banks can continue to issue debt cheaply. But banks in countries with lower savings rates and shakier public finances, most obviously Spain and Britain, still have to find buyers for their debt. How these firms adapt to a world in which banks are no longer seen as risk-free is the tests’ unanswered question.

适度地提高信心是这次测试最可能出现的结果。但是却不足以打开资金市场来达到银行所要求的水平。巴克莱资本银行（Barclays Capital）的Simon Samuels表示，资金现在是欧洲一个独特的问题。由于其庞大的银行系统和较高的贷存比率，欧洲再次融资所需求的资金要远高于其他银行系统（见图表）。多亏有强大的主权，德国银行业可以继续发行廉价的债券。但是身处那些低储蓄率或是公共财政不稳定国家的银行(最明显的是西班牙和英国)仍然不得不为他们的债券寻找买家。关于这些公司如何去适应银行界已不是零风险的乌托邦这个现实，却是测试无法回答的问题。