Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Which Banks Have the Largest Exposure to Italian Debt

I had planned to post the numbers later today but ZeroHedge (and Reuters) did the heavy lifting.
First up:
Visualizing Where The Pain Is: Summary Of Biggest Exposures To Italy
Yesterday's Barclays report that Italy is past the point of no return was very prescient. As of today, nobody can deny that Italy is about to drag the entire Eurozone down unless the ECB can come up with a real plan to monetize the debt, as opposed to backing some retarded contraption such as the EFSF which only the criminally stupid eurocrats can conceive, and which even the perpetually optimistic market has seen right through at this point.

In other words: print. Lots. So until Mario Draghi gets off the phone with the corner office at 200 West for instructions on how to best proceed, here is a visual summary courtesy of Reuters, of where the max pain is concentrated. Needless to say, we are all so lucky that French banks managed to sell off their exposure to unwitting bagholders who took the sticky EURUSD as an all clear signal, instead of what it was this entire time: a side-effect of EUR repatriation as French banks were dumping USD-denominated assets and shoring up capital.
Source: Reuters

Which was followed by:
Italian Exposure By Bank 
Previously we showed what the sovereign gross level exposure to Italy is. Now, it is time to get granular and show the data at a discrete level. Below are the banks most exposed to Italy. Don't forget that courtesy of our wonderful fractional reserve financial system, with everyone's asset being someone else's liability, the question then becomes who has most exposure to these banks, and then most exposure to banks that have exposure to these banks, and so forth....MORE
Which was pretty much the point of last Wednesday's "Big U.S. Banks Betting on Big European Banks Betting on Big Europe"