Marina Conesa Martínez, Giulia Lotti, Andrew Powell
The current pandemic crisis is challenging the banking system along both known and unknown tracks (Carletti et al. 2020, Beck and Keil 2021). While the accumulation of non-performing loans (NPLs) on banks’ balance sheets is typical for country-wide macroeconomic crises, there are several other characteristics of the pandemic that are not: first, the extraordinary cross-sector differences in the crisis’ impact (Demmou et al. 2021); second, the significant fiscal support addressing firms and households (Aussiloux et al. 2021); and third, the high degree of uncertainty concerning the economic consequences of serial lockdowns (Woloszko 2020, Ornelas 2020). The high degree of uncertainty is also the reason why policy proposals on NPL resolution should take a scenario-based approach (i.e. they should be designed as conditional on the events unfolding).
Arnoud Boot, Elena Carletti, Hans‐Helmut Kotz, Jan Pieter Krahnen, Loriana Pelizzon, Marti Subrahmanyam
In the early stages of the Covid-19 crisis, concerns emerged over potential divergence in the euro area (e.g. Boot et al. 2020). These concerns were valid given the unprecedented scale and asymmetric impact of the shock. These concerns were also aggravated by the initial situation of the euro area, with potentially destabilising imbalances between ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ countries.
Calls for coordinated responses – in particular on the fiscal front – appeared quickly (Baldwin and Weder di Mauro 2020). The ECB acted fast in order to provide fiscal space (Bartsch et al. 2020a) by keeping borrowing costs low and by effectively providing a monetary backstop to government debt. The same authors also noted that “correcting current imbalances between investment and saving, could set in a virtuous circle of stronger growth and reduced indebtedness” (Bartsch et al. 2020
Thorsten Beck
The Covid-19 pandemic will leave deep scars across the globe, particularly in the euro area. Given that the health of banking systems is inextricably tied to the performance of the underlying economies, the non-performing loans (NPLs) of banks are an important issue. What are the policy options to safeguard the integrity and functionality of the banking system? And what are the criteria defining the desired response? This column will address these questions in the context of the EU.
What makes the identification of a suitable policy response particularly difficult is the strong reliance on banks and the apparent ‘overbanking’ in Europe (Pagano et al. 2014). At the national level, banking markets are highly concentrated, and many institutions are considered too-big-to-fail. The structurally low profitability of European banking makes this even more of a concern.