The shares of European banks lost more than 120,000 million euros of value on the stock market in the last two weeks.
The fall of US banks Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank sparked runs on the European stock market, fearing a new financial crisis.
The first victim was Credit Suisse, which had to be absorbed by its peer UBS with the support of the Swiss authorities.
This Friday it was the turn of Deutsche Bank, whose shares closed the day with a decrease of 8.53%. This was enough to drag down all the European banks.
By announcing that it will repay the subordinated debt of 1,500 million dollars (1,379 million euros) before maturity, the credit default swaps (CDS) of the main bank in Germany, a payment insurance for bondholders, rose from 142 to 200 basis points in just two days, the highest level since the beginning of 2019.
In this context of high nervousness, investors came out to get rid of the German entity, to such an extent that their papers dropped as much as 15%. At that time, the German Chancellor himself, Olaf Scholz, came out to emphasize that Deutsche Bank is a “profitable” entity, for which “there is no reason” to be concerned, a phrase that allowed the bullfight to stop.
The Danish Sydbank has been the bank that fell the most this Friday, with a decrease of 10.88%, followed by the Scandinavian Nordea, which has done the same with 8.54%.
For its part, the Swiss UBS closed with a loss of 3.55%, in a day in which the specialized agency Bloomberg reported that the United States Department of Justice is investigating whether employees of this bank, Credit Suisse and other entities , helped Russian oligarchs evade sanctions imposed for the invasion of Ukraine.
Other banks, the French Société Générale and the German Commerzbank, lost 6.13% and 5.45%, respectively.
According to data collected by the EFE agency, the main European banks (Santander, BBVA, BNP Paribas, Société Générale, Nordea, ING, Unicredit, Intesa, Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank) are worth 13% less on the stock market, which implies the loss of value of 121,465 million euros.
Such is the situation that this Friday, the US Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, called a closed-door meeting of the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC). Although she did not provide further details on the objective of the meeting, the operators discount that they will analyze the details of the banking crisis that affects the banks and the main stock markets.