As the EU’s wealthiest country, Luxembourg could have been forgiven for thinking that it would never find itself on the bloc’s financial-risk list.
With just half a million people living on a tiny patch of lush land nestled between Belgium, France and Germany, Luxembourg is as tranquil as a buzzing financial center gets.
Still, some of Europe’s regulators and politicians have started wondering aloud whether its banks might be holding the 17-nation eurozone’s next ticking bomb.
Following the chaotic bailout for Cyprus last week, European officials have been drawing worrying comparisons between the two countries’ oversized financial industries.
European Central Bank President Mario Draghi cautioned on Thursday that “the recent experience shows that countries where the banking sector is several times bigger than the economy are countries that, on average, have more vulnerabilities.”
“Financial shocks hit these countries stronger, simply because of the size of their banking sector,” Draghi said.
The increased scrutiny has taken Luxembourg’s government by surprise and put it on the defensive.
The government has rejected calls to shrink its country’s main source of wealth to a more manageable size, claiming that its banking industry is much more secure than that of Cyprus and any crackdown would not only harm its own economy, but that of the wider eurozone.
Cyprus was forced to seek a bailout from its eurozone partners after its once-thriving banking industry collapsed. The country could not afford to bail out its financial sector which, thanks to massive deposits of foreigners, had grown to eight times the size of its economy.
The 10 billion euro (US$12.9 billion) rescue loan package comes with tough austerity measures attached, as well as a brutal shrinking of the banking industry and significant losses for savers with deposits larger than 100,000 euros.
In comparison, the balance sheets of the banks in Luxembourg have swollen to about 22 times the country’s annual economic output of 44 billion euros — making it Europe’s richest country per capita.
The country is also the world’s second-largest center for investment funds, with about 3,800 funds holding assets worth 2.5 trillion euros — about 55 times the country’s GDP. It has 141 banks based there, with five of them domestic institutions and the remainder being mainly divisions of foreign banks.
“There are no parallels between Cyprus and Luxembourg, and we don’t allow any parallels to be forced on us,” Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker said last week.
“Cyprus is a special case; other financial hubs in Europe don’t have these problems,” he added.
Luxembourg also has relatively little debt, so it could afford to borrow to bail out the odd bank. However, if it faced a widespread problem, it might not be able to cope.
“One does not want to imagine what would happen if the whole banking sector were to derail,” said lawmaker Joachim Poss, the deputy caucus leader of Germany’s Social Democrats, the country’s main opposition party.
If things in Luxembourg’s financial sector were to go wrong, the country might not get help from its eurozone partners so easily. For one thing, it will not be able to say it was not warned.
Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the plain-spoken chairman of the bloc’s 17 finance ministers, warned other countries with outsized banking sectors to “deal with it before you get in trouble.”
“Strengthen your banks, fix your balance sheets and realize that if a bank gets in trouble, the response will no longer automatically be ‘we’ll come and take away your problems,’” he said.
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