Investment banks are secretly profiting from emergency European Central Bank funding by acting as brokers to funnel billions of euros of much needed liquidity to Britain's banks and building societies. Bankers said that UK lenders were having to access the ECB through the back door UK lenders with no operations in Europe are particularly at risk of funding problems because they have been struggling to access central bank money.
While the ECB has pumped more than $500bn (£254bn) into the wholesale funding markets, dropped its penal rate and widened the collateral it accepts as security, the Bank of England has injected just £20bn. In what one executive said was a way of "levelling the playing field" for those without access to eurozone funding, investment banks are acting as go-betweens to provide smaller UK lenders with ECB access.
Lloyds TSB chief executive Eric Daniels last week confirmed the bank, which has a European presence, had used the ECB to "fund at the best rate we can". Other UK banks such as Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS are thought to have made similar moves.
For those without a European presence, the funding works in two stages. First, the UK domestic lender parcels up assets and pledges them to investment banks in return for liquidity. Those investment banks can then pledge the assets on to the ECB, which becomes the ultimate funding source.
The investment banks make their money by charging a higher rate of interest than the ECB.
Alliance & Leicester demonstrated the scale of the opportunity last week, revealing it paid £150m to secure funding through to 2009 in what finance director Chris Rhodes labelled "the cost of the credit crunch". A&L has securitised £17bn of its mortgage assets in two vehicles, pledging "a material proportion" as collateral against new facilities. It is not clear if the investment banks have exchanged the pledges for funds at the ECB but it is understood that A&L's collateral would be acceptable once restructured.
Building societies are also likely to be using the facility. One banker said: "If you were a UK lender and you had assets against which you could draw down funds, why wouldn't you do it?"
Bankers said the fact that UK lenders were having to access the ECB through the back door exposed failures at the Bank of England.
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The US Dollar declined for the second week in a row as the economic data produced nothing but drab news. CPI continued to press higher with core readings reaching 2.5% while headline prices clocked in at 4.3% as rise in commodities showed that inflation is very much alive. But price stability is not a concern for the Fed at the moment.
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