-- Paul Taylor is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own --
By Paul Taylor
PARIS, May 13 (Reuters) - The European Union is going to stress test its banking system -- but not individual banks -- and plans to keep the results secret. It's hard to see how such a half-measure will restore investor or public confidence.
EU finance ministers have asked the Committee of European Banking Supervisors to test the resilience of national banking systems to financial crisis by September. But this falls short of the IMF's call for coordinated action to recognise individual banks' losses and clean up the banking system.
The U.S. stress test of individual banks made public last week helped give markets some clarity. However, the amount of capital some banks were deemed to require appears to have been altered, either after back-room negotiations with the U.S. Treasury or to fit the amount of public money available.
In Europe, where the IMF says banks are carrying more unrecognised losses than their U.S. counterparts, the response has been a patchwork of uncoordinated and sometimes mutually undermining actions.
German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck resisted calls to conduct and publish an EU-wide test of individual banks' capital needs, arguing it could undermine confidence in the financial sector's recovery. His main concern seems to be to avoid embarrassing German banks and the government with awkward numbers before a Sept. 27 general election.
The Berlin cabinet approved on Wednesday a complex system of government-guaranteed bad banks to park nearly 200 billion euros of toxic assets from individual private and state-owned banks.
The aim is to take the assets off balance sheets, give the banks time to provision for losses on them, and postpone any cost to the taxpayer by holding the assets until maturity.
Britain, by contrast, has used a mixture of nationalisation and government insurance to try to solve the problem, while keeping the impaired assets on banks' balance sheets. Ireland, with a severe banking crisis, has taken the "bad bank" route, but France and Italy have rejected it.
Perhaps the EU is playing for time in the hope that banks can work their own way out of the mess. Some ministers clearly also fear daunting figures for banks' exposure to bad debts and currency risk in central and eastern Europe.
But the political fudge of holding a partial stress test in secret reflects the flaws of a system where responsibility for supervision of cross-border banks remains at national level, even though many of the problems and exposures are Europe-wide. It only underlines the case for a more integrated European system of financial supervision. (editing by David Evans)