by Wolf Richter, Wolf Street:
The “second wave,” if prolonged, could cause bad loans to almost triple, to €1.4 trillion, says the ECB.
German banks need to prepare themselves for a sharp spike in corporate bankruptcies early next year, the Bundesbank warned this week in its 2020 Financial Stability Review. It anticipates around 6,000 insolvencies in the first quarter of 2021. While this would be a little lower than at the peak quarter of the Global Financial Crisis, the Bundesbank cautioned that it “cannot rule out that … a lot more companies will go bankrupt than is currently expected.”
“The same big tech companies that are wary of being regulated by the US government in order to protect free speech, will gladly volunteer to be regulated by foreign governments so that they can restrict free speech,” NewsBusters’ Alexander Hall reports.