Came across this report this morning. Apparantly it is correct and not just another rumour in an attempt to put Spain down.

It is slightly worrying. 

Seven EU banks fail stress tests

Seven of the 91 European banks that underwent stress tests have failed the healthchecks, the Committee of European Banking Supervisors (CEBS) has said.

They include five Spanish banks - Diada, Espiga, Banca Civica, Unnim and Cajasur. The other two were Germany's Hypo Real Estate and Greece's ATEbank.

The tests assessed banks' ability to survive future economic shocks.

The seven banks would need a total of 3.5bn euros (£3bn) of new capital to meet the standards required, CEBS said.

"[The failed banks] will have to agree with their respective supervisors a plan over a given time period which will explain how this weakness will be resolved," CEBS chairman Giovanni Carosio said.

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I am not an economic expert but it does seem we are not out of the woods yet.

Worth keeping an eye on.

Of those banks in Spain, I have only heard of Cajasur which had problems a couple of months ago and had to be bailed out.  Only 4 UK banks underwent the test (and all passed) but 27 Spanish banks had the test done.  Does this mean that Spain has a lot more banks than UK?  I know most of the UK ones have amalgamated (Halifax Bank of Scotland and RBS NatWest for example) and we have very few of the old style smaller ones left.  However, these Spanish ones are savings banks and it would have been interesting to see the results if these tests had been applied to the UK building societies rather than the big banks.  I would imagine something like HBOS and RBS would be better situated to weather any storm than, for example, Cheltenham & Gloucester.  We've already had Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley almost go to the wall and have been part-nationalised.  The Leeds has been taken over by Halifax (part of the Bank of Scotland) and I definitely don't see any of the smaller ones that used to litter the high streets.

Again, the German one that failed was also more in line with our building societies rather than a fully fledged bank.

Interesting times ahead.  I would assume that some of the smaller Spanish savings banks would be in line for takeovers by the big boys (Santander appears to be conquering the rest of the world at the moment).

I think Lloyds TSB have taken over Cheltenham and Gloucester!!!!

Pat

Yeah, Lloyds took them over in 1997.

Lloyds TSB is Halifax, BOS, all one bank.

I received a letter from Banco halifax informing me that they would be incharge of all Lloyds/HBOS outlets in spain.

These stress tests look like a bit of a farce don't they?  Especially given that the Spanish banks are still hiding massive property related losses.  Lets see the Cajas write down their property book to get a real picture of the state that the Spanish banking sector is in.  Instead of these mickey mouse hypothetical stress tests.