The Germans, in particular, are against it. Jens Weidmann, the president of the German central bank, said the ECB can't lend to sovereign governments because it would violate the treaty establishing the European Union. "I cannot see how you can ensure the stability off a monetary union by violating its legal provisions," Weidmann told the Financial Times.
Lannoo also faults the European Banking Authority for continuing to assign zero risk weight to sovereign bonds, even though everyone knows countries like Greece and Portugal can't pay their debts and the banks will not get fully repaid. Under the European rules, if a bank owns a government bond from Europe, it doesn't have to hold capital against it. So many banks loaded up on their own country's debt.
It's created a weird dichotomy in Europe: banks that gorged on sovereign debt, particularly in France and Germany, are considered the most creditworthy, while banks in Spain, which lent money to the private sector and thoughtfully diversified their business to Latin America, are considered risky, which forces them to raise the most capital. The most absurd example is Spanish bank Banco Santander, which most analysts consider one of the best-run banks in Europe. But under the new rules, Santander must raise $9 billion in new capital.
"They are just furious in Spain," Lannoo says. "If you want to encourage banks to lend to enterprise then you don't penalize them for having higher risk assets."
Nicolas Véron, senior fellow for financial regulation at Bruegel, a Bruseels-based think-tank, says the problem of recapitalizing the banks was exacerbated by the fact that many national governments were reluctant to inject cash into their banks because they lack funds.
"It's an impossible equation," Véron says. "Member states don't want to nationalize their banks, but the marketplace is not ready to provide huge capital infusions. Therefore the fallback position is deleveraging, which is clearly not great economically and may be actually very bad."
Véron says a European-wide fund is needed to recapitalize the banks, which should be offered some kind of asset swaps to bail them out. Otherwise, he says, the European crisis seems doomed to keep unraveling.