As Renzi clarified in Parliament, in the ongoing negotiations on the banking union, Italy is asking for the construction of a European fund for the guarantee of deposits, but opposes the questioning, through quantitative constraints or rules on capital absorption, of the role of sovereign bonds in banks' portfolios. It is a position that we must defend tooth and nail since, without the bank support, significant difficulties could arise in the placement of government bonds in several countries. But it is a position that is justified in a situation of particular fragility both in some countries and in the Eurozone as a whole.
Fully operational, in one banking union Indeed, it is completely natural that the riskiest government bonds absorb more capital than the others: if this did not happen, the authorities would not adequately protect savers.
It is clear that, other things being equal, a bank with German securities in its portfolio is less risky than a bank with Greek securities. Supervisors cannot pretend that the two banks are the same, and if they did so without having a strong regulatory protection they could also be brought to court by damaged savers in the event, for example, of a possible new restructuring of the Greek debt. A bit as if a circular from some Italian authority had given savers the (false) information that subordinated bank bonds were risk-free: obviously today that authority should account for such misleading information.
The same would happen if the supervisory authorities European Unions decide on their own initiative not to take into account the different risks for savers of banks exposed to different sovereign risks. The point is that to some extent the Italian request seems to imply that European supervision does not ask banks to cover, with appropriate provisions, the risks they assume with savers' money.
The question becomes even more delicate if you ask that all countries contribute to a single European guarantee fund and that they do so in the same way, i.e. without taking into account the different riskiness of the individual banks, and without the differences in the risks of the assets having been eliminated or at least attenuated by the capital ratios. In the United States, insurance premiums paid by participating banks deposit insurance scheme (FDIC) take into account the riskiness of individual banks, which in turn also depends on the quality of the securities in the portfolio, including government securities. For example, according to Standard & Poor's, the state of Indiana has triple A while Illinois stops at A-.
Puerto Rico it failed and is one step below Argentina. So we shouldn't be surprised that the Germans oppose our requests: they are not angry with us, as some seem to think. They have some good reason and, above all, they are concerned that these requests involve a potential transfer, not negligible in size, of resources from the "core" countries to the so-called "periphery" countries. The battle a Brussels it is therefore very difficult, but it must be won. And to overcome it it is useful to understand the reasons of others; instead it is counterproductive to demonize them, offend them or accuse them of hegemonic aims which, thank goodness, they do not have.
