It is clear that in two years, for the next stress tests, the EBA will be repositioned in the EU and will abandon the City. Bearing in mind that this exercise appears to be vital for supervisory bodies to improve the state of banks' balance sheets, perhaps it will not only change the location but also the methodology, which for the moment does not affect the arbitrariness of managing many of the data considered in the tests of scenery.
From 123 banks in 2014, this fell to 51 banks, thus excluding the banks of Portugal, Cyprus and Greece. Of the 72 excluded, only Monte dei Paschi di Siena had the honor of remaining in the list of banks analyzed and from the results it is easy to understand why. This exercise, which makes the EBA a vital body, aimed to assess the vulnerabilities left uncovered after the banks have been bombarded with extremely burdensome regulations in recent years and above all to assess the impact of adverse and concomitant dynamics (as if in the last two years had we not experienced the impossible between Chinese devaluations, frightening attacks, the refugee emergency and the collapse of the price lists at the beginning of the year). I wonder why the stress tests only involve banks and not asset management companies or insurance companies - exempt from these shamanic practices - or better yet, financial groups in their complex of highly correlated financial activities.
The results, except for Mps, were satisfactory in avoiding an intervention by the regulators who could have solicited the necessary moves to return within the parameters and therefore in compliance with the capital ratios, or at least to keep them above the safety threshold, which in 2014 was 5,5%. Italy and Spain come out with their heads held high, but, looking at the bottom ten, Germany, Ireland and Great Britain don't come out very well. Among the banks that find themselves in the most adverse scenario, between the threshold of 5,5% and 8% (which corresponds to the minimum necessary Cet1 to avoid receivership), Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank and Barclays stand out together with Unicredit.
And if Brexit is proving to be a bargain for Irish banks, as evidenced by the plans to move M&G and many others to Dublin, for German banks the situation of low profitability evident and exposure to derivatives not fully valued by these stresses tests remain a ballast. The consequences on the subordinates of the most fragile banks highlighted by these tests are therefore inevitable.
For Italy, beyond the MPS case, which has been widely reported in newspapers around the world, there is another evident truth, and that is that, if the next referendum on the constitutional reform does not pass, the recovery of the quotations will verify after these stress tests, bringing our price list back to the "launching ramp" between 18 and 20 points, will reverse course with yet another wave of speculation on banks, which, clinging to the political variable, could drastically bring prices back even at break the safeguard threshold of 15 thousand points.
As Draghi has repeatedly underlined, the issue of non-performing loans requires solutions in agreement with the EU and in my opinion there is no need to rest on the laurels of the last-minute solution found for MPS that we all experienced as an episode of Secret, that is a tragic soap opera characterized by human cases from another era. But we need to find an overall solution to definitively shelter the Italian banking system, which emerges from these tests with an improved and satisfactory degree of solvency, launching effective regulations for the Npl market.
Otherwise we will continue to see high frequency traders and hedge funds playing with our price list in defiance of the Tobin Tax and playing Pokemon Go with our banks, once again at the expense of end investors, who with rates below zero and orphans of BTPs take refuge in shares and in dividend campaigns in search of a return safe from excessive commission charges.
