ECB Bailout 'Will Cost France' Its Triple-A Rating: Kyle Bass
By: The European Central Bank's bailout, estimated to be about 2 billion euros in Italian and Spanish debt, "will cost France and maybe even Germany their triple-A ratings," Kyle Bass, managing partner of Hayman Capital, told CNBC Monday.
"Supposedly this is the sixth save for the euro zone," Bass said. "When you understand the mechanisms of this European financial stability facility, today it has 440 billion euros in lending capacity. They have to raise 780 billion euros in debt to fund this," said Bass.
"There are several countries [in Europe] that have sailed into the zone of insolvency," he added. The zone of insolvency is "just like at home when you can't pay your bills."
Bass went on to say the European banking system is "about three times as leveraged as the U.S. banking system, and they haven't recapitalized their system because they don't have a lender of last resort like the [Federal Reserve] in the United States."
U.S. banks are in better shape than European banks, he added. Europe doesn't "have the money to recap their banks because they don't have a mechanism to print the money like we do."
But Bass acknowledge that "it doesn't take a genius to see that in the U.S., when you bring in $2.3 trillion of revenue and you spend $3.7 trillion, that maybe we're not a triple-A."
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