银行大救援可能压垮西班牙

    初闻西班牙达成1,000亿欧元的银行业救助方案，投资者欢欣鼓舞，但是慢慢消化方案的细节后，这种热情可能不会持续多久。由马德里和布鲁塞尔协力撮合并于上周末出台的这一方案不过是个骗人的把戏，房地产贷款损失只是从银行的账上转到了西班牙政府同样糟糕的资产负债表上。这一方案无耻地将银行损失公众化，不仅可能引发西班牙街头暴乱，而且还可能进一步提高、而不是降低西班牙政府的融资难度，使它更难以足够低的利率发行债券来为自己提供融资。

    最终，西班牙政府可能自己也会需要救助，重演希腊、爱尔兰和邻国葡萄牙已经发生过的局面。但鉴于西班牙GDP是上述三国GDP总和的两倍，救助西班牙可能成为一个催化剂，欧元区要么更加抱团，要么干脆分崩离析。

    西班牙上任不久的新首相马里亚诺•拉霍伊直到5月29日还在说，西班牙不需要任何形式的救助。他坚信自他去年11月掌权以来，他领导的保守党西班牙人民党（People's Party）进行的改革足以恢复人们对西班牙经济的信心。

    西班牙人民党推进了一些积极的改革，比如建立正式的债务限额，设立预算赤字上限等，但它同时仍在继续执行前任社会党制定的一些错误政策，特别是强迫银行业弱弱合并。这个政策背后的逻辑是通过扩大规模，将这些各自持有几十亿欧元房地产坏账的银行拼凑在一起，希望能更好地应对不断累积的损失。

    这显然不是应对该国银行业困境的最佳方式。结果，市场惩罚了西班牙主权债券，因为该国银行体系显然已处于崩溃边缘，而该国政府也没有办法靠自己来解决这个问题。

    拉霍伊不得不放低身段，上周末宣布西班牙“准备”接受1,000亿欧元的银行业救助方案。救助的技术细节仍需厘清，但我们已经大致知道它将如何进行。欧盟（EU）将通过两家特殊救助基金——欧洲金融稳定安排（European Financial Stability Facility，EFSF）和欧洲稳定机制（European Stability Mechanism, ESM）中的一家或两家将资金转入西班牙自己的救助基金、近来资金枯竭的银行有序重组基金（FROB）。然后，FROB很可能向陷入困境的银行直接注入资金，填补由西班牙房价大跌造成的资产负债表缺口。

    Investors initially cheered the news that Spain reached a deal for a 100 billion euro bank bailout, but that enthusiasm may not last once the details are digested. The deal, concocted in Madrid and Brussels over the weekend, amounts to a kind of shell game, whereby bank property losses are simply transferred from the banks over to the Spanish government's weak balance sheet. Not only is this bailout likely to create public outrage in the streets of Spain, as it shamelessly socializes bank losses, but it will probably make it harder, not easier, for Spain to sell its debt at a low enough rate to fund itself.

    Eventually, the Spanish government will need its own bailout, similar to what has already occurred in Greece, Ireland and neighboring Portugal. But with a GDP that's twice as high as those three countries combined, a Spanish sovereign bailout could be the catalyst that either forces the eurozone closer together or smashes it apart.

    Spain's relatively new Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, maintained as late as May 29 that his nation did not need a bailout of any kind. He was confident that the reforms his conservative People's Party (PP) had put in place since coming to power in November of last year were strong enough to bring confidence back to the nation's shaky economy.

    But while the PP pushed through some positive reforms, like establishing a formal debt limit and setting a budget deficit ceiling, it also continued some of the more questionable policies set in place by its socialist predecessors, most notably, the policy of forcing weak banks to merge. The belief behind this policy was that by being bigger, those weak banks, which were all carrying billions of euros worth of bad property loans on their books, would somehow cope better with their mounting losses after being smashed together.

    That obviously was not the best way to deal with the nation's bank woes. The market punished Spanish sovereign bonds as it became clear that the country's banking system was teetering near collapse and the government did not have the means to take care of the issue on its own.

    Swallowing his pride, Rajoy announced this weekend that his nation was "open" to receiving a bailout of its banking sector to the tune of 100 billion euros. The mechanics of the bailout still need to be ironed out, but we know roughly how it will work. The EU, through either one or both of its special bailout funds, the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) and/or the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), will transfer money to Spain's own bailout fund, the FROB, which recently ran dry. From there the FROB will most likely inject capital directly into weak banks in order to fill the holes in their balance sheets caused by the massive decline in property values in the country.