Newspapers : the EU and the Financial crisis 14th October

Financial crisis boosts German banks. Michael Levitin, The Telegraph (en)
" ... Sparkasse savings bank and other state-run banks like it are awash in new business since late September, as Germans rush to deposit money where they perceive it will be safest ..."

Brown is still no great statesman. Simon Heffer, The Telegraph (en)
" ... Mr Brown had hinted in his conference speech at Manchester three weeks ago that a boy should not be sent to do a man's job in sorting out the financial system. According to the rest of the world, he seems to have been vindicated. Yet in all this it is easy to forget just what a signal part Mr Brown played in making the crisis so bad here as it was. It was down to him that the supply of money grew at the prodigious speed it did, allowing the banks easy access to cheap money to lend on in their pursuit of shareholder value ..."

Scotland's bank shame the Union's gain . Alan Cochrane, The Telegraph (en)
" ... Overshadowing the shock is a feeling of acute embarrassment, shame even, that RBS and HBOS should have been brought so low. These banks, both of which have their headquarters in Edinburgh, gave a country of five million people a place on the world stage ...
... Sitting in his wood-panelled office in St Andrew's House, seat of Scotland's devolved administration, Alex Salmond was counting another likely cost of the unprecedented action - the body blow it delivers to his hopes of achieving an independent Scotland ...
... RBS and HBOS helped make Edinburgh Britain's second biggest and one of Europe's biggest financial centres. Their reputation for caution and respectability was jealously guarded by Scots, but when "the Royal" took over NatWest in 2000 - beating off a rival bid from "the Bank" in the process - there was an enormous amount of pride that a small Scottish concern could gobble up a much bigger English entity.
But pride has turned to ashes in the mouths of most Scots because that takeover began the aggressive and extraordinary expansion of this once tiny operation. RBS swallowed up NatWest, which was then quickly followed by a merger of the Bank of Scotland and Halifax, the building society-turned bank, to form HBOS ...

It all went wrong when we left the gold standard. Dominic Lawson, The Independent (en)
" ... There is, however, a small band of men and women – long insulted as fanatics or even fantasists by the political mainstream – who can now say: "We told you so." I am not referring to the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist). No, I'm talking about the followers of the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) ...
... Mises believed that any currency which was not backed by gold was powerless to resist the depredations of governments and bankers addicted to the possibilities of limitless credit ...
... Up until August 1971, the owner of dollars could, at least theoretically, exchange them for gold. That month France, to whom the US owed about $3bn as part of the financing of the Vietnam War, demanded that the dollar debt be repaid in gold. Unfortunately, there was no longer enough in the vaults of Fort Knox. Apparently there exists a tape of Richard Nixon saying: "Screw the French!". America immediately came off the gold standard ...
... Mises' followers insist that the present problems in the economies of the West have not been caused by laissez-faire, but by the opposite: politically sensitive central bankers so desperate to prevent any stock market slump that they cut interest rates to a level which turbo-charged the debt markets.

Rumours swirl over which banks want help. Scheherazade Daneshkhu, The FT (en)
" ... As France's top bankers go to the Elysée palace on Tuesday morning to see President Nicolas Sarkozy, the question is which banks will ask for a share in the €40bn of capital funding the government announced on Monday ...
... So far, French banks have prided themselves on being less fragile than their counterparts in the US, Germany and the UK, because of their higher deposit base ...
... Of big French banks, only the mutual, unquoted Group Banque Populaire has a tier one ratio of more than 9 per cent. The others are in a range of 8-9 per cent ..."

Turmoil brings out best in Europe. Tony Barber, The FT (en)
" ... Until Sunday’s eurozone summit in Paris, heads of government from the 15 countries sharing the euro had never held a formal meeting since the currency’s launch in January 1999 ...
... “Every past crisis has been a learning experience on the European level,” Ursula Plassnik, Austria’s foreign minister, said on Monday at a foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg.
“Over the past few days we’ve developed a common European consciousness in the financial crisis that we will now translate into action,” she told reporters at an EU foreign ministers’ meeting ... "

Sarkozy promises €360bn to aid French banks. Ben Hall, The FT (en)
" ... the French president, pledged €320bn ($435bn, £250bn) in guarantees for new bank debt on Monday and a €40bn fund for recapitalising lenders as he unveiled his country’s contribution to a eurozone-wide bail-out programme ...
... “I would be astonished if French banks did not request capital so at least they can get on an equal footing with the British banks,” said Christine Lagarde, finance minister. The French plan marks a change of tack by Paris, which only a few days ago was sticking to its policy of bail-outs on a case-by-case basis ...

Icelandic women to clean up ‘male mess’. Sarah O’Connor, The FT (en)