BRUSSELS (MNI) – Ireland’s banks have very large borrowings from
the European Central Bank and investors still don’t have confidence in
the institutions, the country’s central bank governor and ECB Governing
Council member Patrick Honohan said Wednesday.
“The borrowings of Irish banks from the ECB are very large,”
Honohan told lawmakers in the Irish parliament in Dublin. His testimony
is being broadcast live on the Web.
Honohan told the lawmakers that investor confidence “has not yet
been as strong as one would have hoped for” and he said, “I sense a
concern in the market that some other problems might be hiding somewhere
in the banks.”
Ireland’s banks fell into difficulty in 2008 after the country’s
property boom imploded. Many of the banks have been partially or fully
nationalised and others are surviving only on generous liquidity
provisions from the European Central Bank since a loss of confidence has
locked them out of the interbank market.
–Brussels: 0032 487 (0) 32 803 665, echarlton@marketnews.com
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