Banking crisis: has the city weathered the financial storm?

It was perhaps inevitable that, after the shock collapse of Credit Suisse, attention would switch to another European bank with “a patchy record”, said Lex in the FT.

But Deutsche Bank withstood the tumult, albeit after losing 14% of its value in a morning – a measure of its rebuilt stability.

“The cause of the turmoil appeared to be a jump in the cost of insuring against a Deutsche bond default”, but even “pessimistic analysts struggled to doubt the bank’s financial resilience”. The likely culprit appears to have been “panic’s invisible hand”.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Deutsche stopped the domino effect and calm was restored. In America, the lender that started it all, Silicon Valley Bank, was sold off to its regional peer, First Citizens, with a “staggering” subsidy on Monday.

By Tuesday morning, traders had all but declared the banking crisis over.

‘A far slower burn’

Don’t speak too soon, said Jonathan Prynn in the Evening Standard. We tend to remember the “tumultuous climax” of the global banking crisis 15 years ago, and often forget that it was actually “a far slower burn”.

A full year elapsed between the first major UK drama – the run on Northern Rock in 2007 – and the final denouement, which saw the partial nationalisation of Lloyds, Halifax and Royal Bank of Scotland “to prevent Britain’s entire financial sector collapsing”.

This time may be no different. No one really knows where this “rolling series of banking crises” will end, said Jeremy Warner in The Sunday Telegraph.

“But what’s clear is that the main culprits are again our old friends the central banks” which, after belatedly recognising the danger of inflation, “slammed on the brakes with a tightening of unprecedented speed and quantity” – giving the system “no time to adjust to the new world order”.

‘US problems cause global recessions'

The turmoil is by no means over. What will be the next thing to go bang, asked Oliver Shah in The Sunday Times.

Arguably, any area “where leveraged assets bought near the top of the cycle face debt repayment deadlines”. Commercial property might well be a source of “landmines”.

The longer-run danger, said Jason Douglas in The Wall Street Journal, is the risk to global growth. “Turmoil in the US banking sector isn’t just a problem for the US. It also increases the risks of a global recession.”

Damage to the banking system will certainly prove “consequential”, said The Economist. But assuming we avoid another big shock, “it’s unlikely to push the world economy over the edge”.

There are forces working in the other direction too: the rebound of China; falling energy prices; disappearing supply chain bottlenecks. It’s easy to overdo the gloom. “Do not be surprised if the world economy’s unusual resilience continues.”