ECB To Reveal Bank Balance Sheet Review in March

The European Central Bank kept the euro zone’s top lenders on tenterhooks as it promised to reveal the strategy for its unprecedented review of bank balance sheets by the end of March, giving only scant detail on Monday.

The ECB’s asset quality review, or AQR, is part of a broader examination that also includes a stress test to see how banks hold up under shock scenarios, to avoid nasty surprises once it starts supervising them from November.

The exercise aims to encourage banks to recognize losses on loans or investments that have soured over time, allowing them to regain investors’ trust and free up capacity to grant new loans to help along the euro zone’s fragile economic recovery.

“We believe very much that recovery in 2015 will benefit from this exercise,” Constancio told reporters at a news conference.

via Reuters

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Alfonso Esparza

Alfonso Esparza

Senior Currency Analyst at Market Pulse
Alfonso Esparza specializes in macro forex strategies for North American and major currency pairs. Upon joining OANDA in 2007, Alfonso Esparza established the MarketPulseFX blog and he has since written extensively about central banks and global economic and political trends. Alfonso has also worked as a professional currency trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.
Alfonso Esparza