Hypo Real Estate, Germany’s second largest real estate lender, teeters on the verge of collapse. The bank has a €400 billion balance sheet, which would make for a failure of a similar scale to Lehman’s (Hypo’s footings are roughly $550 billion, while Lehman’s were $660 billion as of its last balance sheet date).
Even though Hypo it technically a bank, it is not a depositary institution, so rescuing it poses similar difficulties (procedural and political) to the authorities as Bear and Lehman did in the US. The financial system cannot take another body blow of this magnitude. The authorities had better patch this one up over the weekend, or we face even more credit market panic on Monday.
And if that weren’t an ugly enough picture, the failure to salvage Hypo has even broader ramifications. From Marshall Auerbach, independent global strategist who does consultancy for a number of funds, and sometimes financial commentator, via e-mail:
The euro is in serious trouble with this Hypo Real Estate collapse. Germans remain completely in denial. The French get it, largely because their clever finance minister, Christine LaGarde, was educated at the University of Chicago and consequently understands something about markets. Sarkozy, to his credit, appears to be listening to her. The Germans are about to destroy EMU with their pigheadedness, and this will be the stuff of revolution, given that the German people were never consulted on abandoning the DM (if there had been a referendum, the euro would have never been accepted in Germany) and were forced to get rid of arguably the most successful post-war monetary institution, the Bundesbank.
The sop thrown their way was the stupid Stability and Growth Pact, designed by former German Finance Minister, Theo Waigel. So he has hoisted the Germans and the euro zone on a German petard. And that’s made things worse! No EU wide guarantee of deposits, no EU-wide prospect of a major fiscal stimulus and bye bye euro.
Read the rest of Yves post and the comments to get the full scale of Europe’s problems.