Bank deposit insurance in Germany
The Einlagensicherungsfonds is the German bank deposit insurance scheme maintained by the Bankenverband. The statutes are quite interesting. §6 (10) on p.12 concerns ordinary clients of failed banks in Germany, like those of Lehman Brothers in Germany:
10. Ein Rechtsanspruch auf ein Eingreifen oder auf Leistungen des Einlagensicherungsfonds besteht nicht.
This says there is no legal title on the bank deposit insurance. This has always seemed to be a minor point, since German banks have been safe and secure places in the last 50 years. But, with the US banking system failing, should we reevaluate this minor point?
The answer is certainly yes. Financial markets are global, and the failure of IKB showed how banks and financial markets are interdependent. A lot of German (and European) banks have lost money in the US financial crisis. The banks themselves seem to be irritated, so irritated that they report the rate at which they lend money to each other (the LIBOR, see my last post). There seems to be a certain level of stress in the system, and the ECB has injected liquidity into the system more than once in the last months. Since the banks don't seem to trust each other with the LIBOR , plus the LIBOR itself is already quite high (see below), it is difficult to make anything more than an informed guess. I am not doing that, but I want to point out that the Einlagensicherungsfonds will only fail if the big German banks break down together. That would still leave room for a bail-out by the government, but hopefully we will not have to think about this.
Posted in European Union, Macro | Tags: bank deposit insurance, Einlagensicherungsfonds
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Do you know if the Einlagenversicherungsfonds are also supposed to cover brokerage accounts? As you know, in the U.S., brokerages are covered by SIPC, not FDIC, so I'm wondering if the Germans also compartmentalize brokerage firms by giving them a separate form of insurance.
ReplyDeleteI am not the author of that article..
ReplyDeleteI found it interesting and copied pasted it..
My knowledge of the German Bank system is very wenig (little in German)...
Lol, Gbu