Do you know the details of their biggest problem? ie, Is it exposure to consumer debt? business debt? sovereign debt?
Hehe, yeah they have a 60 Billion Euro sovereign bond portfolio. Half of that is Belgian. I believe they have a +-400 Billion Balance sheet. 17 Billion capital 10 Billion rescue package from 08 that needs to be repaid 14 Billion Irish mortgages 20 Billion CDO's Large Eastern Europe exposure You get the picture... Oh well.
Well, this has been the case for decades really if not longer. People actually died in riots over internal disputes even in the seventies for instance. What is clear is since the inception of the Euro risk has been allowed to build up out of control. Before the Euro was launched for instance a very significant part of the country's debt was held internally, today I believe over 60% of Belgian debt is held by foreigners. Same goes for banking leverage, etc. I have always been ideologicly in favour of a Euro but clearly the currency union by bringing balance in some area's it brought about big imbalances elsewhere. Yet ofcourse it is not the sole reason for imbalances. Belgian's debt to GDP was at 140% in the early 90's while there was no Euro around back then was there...
Yep, agree... It's a whole lot of things going wrong and no existing mechanism (political, economic, etc) to address the issues. And it's very hard for a committee to create a mechanism from scratch in the heat of battle.
Can't make this stuff up. GMCR +4% NFLX -5.5% Tilson blowing through even more of his investors' (mum, dad, and pop pop?) money.
Ron Johnson (JCP) on creating a great retail store ... http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/11/what_i_learned_building_the_ap.html
Another reason why I like CBK as a short is that (at the time of typing) it's down today, compared to gains of about 1% to 2% for other European banks.
Then again, you could ignore my advice to ignore my fundamental analysis. Because according to this article: www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/22/commerzbank-capital-idUSWEB527520111122 "Commerzbank may need 5 bln eur for EBA -sources" which is a bit higher than the previously published amount of 2.938 billion EUR http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-...-require-eu106-billion-in-capital-table-.html http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/quote?ticker=CBK:GR Bloomberg says 5,113.429 million shares share price at 1.28 EUR market cap = 6.545 billion