European Union Banks to Raise Capital Buffers by June

BRUSSELS (AP) — European governments will force their largest banks to quickly and significantly increase their cushions of capital in order to ride out market turmoil brought on by the debt crisis, officials announced Wednesday.

By the end of June, the banks will need to have a 9% core tier 1 capital ratio — which measures how much good capital a bank holds compared with its risky investments.

The bank recapitalization is an important first step in the grand plan Europe needs to pull the continent back from the brink and prevent another global recession.

With an agreement in place on insulating the banks from turmoil, the leaders can now move on to the sticky question of how big banks’ losses on Greek bonds should be — so the country has a fighting chance of digging out from under its debt burden — and how to ensure that the crisis doesn’t swallow any more countries.

The requirement announced Wednesday evening after a meeting of the leaders of the European Union’s 27 countries represents a significant increase over this summer’s stress tests, which passed banks that had a ratio of 5%.

The new rules will even require banks to fully account for all sovereign debt they hold. The banks’ capital levels will be calculated only after banks mark down the government bonds they held as of Sept. 30 to a value closer to the market price. That presumably is to dissuade banks from suddenly dumping the bonds.

In the July tests, they had been allowed to assume that at least some government debt would be paid in full.