DUBLIN – Ireland’s ailing banks need to be handed another 24 billion euros, or $34 billion, and then be left under state control and facing a complete overhaul, officials announced Thursday in a long-awaited effort to cap a three-year banking crisis.
The Central Bank of Ireland made that recommendation as it published pessimistic results for stress tests on four banks. The banks, whose losses the government insured early in the financial crisis, caused Ireland to need a bailout in the first place, so their fate is closely tied with that of the wider country.
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The tests presumed that the country’s real estate market would keep sinking for the next two years and produce tens of thousands of home foreclosures, a problem that is just starting to bite in a country committed to the idea of home ownership for all.
Central Bank Governor Patrick Honohan said all four banks would need enough money to cover mammoth write-offs of dud property loans and to boost their cash reserves to higher standards. He said these cash requirements can’t be met by any of the banks, so each will have to receive funding from Ireland’s emergency European Union-International Monetary Fund credit line.
In a joint statement, the European Commission, European Central Bank and Washington-based IMF praised the Irish plans as “comprehensive” and “a major step toward restoring the Irish banking system to health.”
In a separate statement, the central bank said it now considered the four banks solvent and worthy of uninterrupted flows of short-term liquidity loans until Ireland’s banks are restructured and able to borrow on open markets again. It also announced a lowering of lending conditions in the interim.
Analysts sounded a skeptical note. They noted that Ireland now has produced three supposedly definitive stress tests on its banks since 2009 claiming to have found the bottom — only to produce even scarier numbers within months.
“Our initial impression is that the question of whether this is enough will continue to linger,” said Marchel Alexandrovich, European financial economist at Jefferies International.
Finance Minister Michael Noonan said the inadequacy of Ireland’s previous stress tests and other bailout efforts meant that, this time, the new government had no choice but to embrace a financial Doomsday scenario — and show how Ireland could withstand it.
“The cost is huge. And it’s huge because Ireland has very little credibility left,” Noonan said in an interview. “So the policy … is to overcapitalize the banks, to restore confidence and credibility. They’re literally being stuffed with capital.”
Noonan said this was necessary because “people don’t believe Irish statistics anymore.”
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