Brussels wants to separate commercial from investment banking

“The radical plan of the EU: break the banks” leads the Süddeutsche Zeitung,summing up the findings of the expert group put together by the European Commissioner for the Internal Market, Michel Barnier, to come up with recommendations for better control of the banks. The main suggestions of the report, presented on October 2, include a proposal that, above a certain threshold, banks hive off financial activity (speculative) from “ordinary” customer deposits to protect those deposits in the event of a banking crisis. For Europe, whose states have had to throw hundreds of billions of euros of public money at their banks, it would amount to a “revolution,” writes the Munich paper, which nonetheless warns politicians never to trust the banks —

So far the reforms undertaken during the financial crisis have done nothing to minimise the destructive potential of the banks. Where the balance sheet of Deutsche Bank is almost as big as Germany’s GDP [economic output], the dangers are obvious – but not a whole lot has been done so far to fence them in.