Bailing Out Bankers Is All the Rage Again
First Germany’s NordLB, then Italy’s Banca Popolare di Bari. Taxpayers are still very much on the hook for the failures of the finance system.
Your money to burn.
Photographer: picture alliance/picture allianceAfter the financial crisis, Europe’s political leaders put together a complex set of rules to make it harder for future governments to bail out banks. That system is looking so full of holes that one wonders what the point of it is.
Two episodes in a fortnight show that taxpayers are still very much on the hook for the financial system’s losses. At the start of December, the European Commission gave a green light to the rescue of NordLB, a German savings bank, by the governments of Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt; the protection scheme of the German savings bank sector also chipped in.