European banks
The major European banks have seen their revenues stabilise in 2017, and
through further cost-cutting and improvements in asset quality, their profitability
rebounded strongly to the second-best figure in the past decade.
However,banks continued to shrink, and both total assets and risk-weighted assets fell
substantially. This helped capital and leverage ratios to reach new record highs,
finally laying questions about the sector’s capitalisation levels to rest, at least on
aggregate.
Large European banks lost ground versus smaller competitors and
also remained far behind their US peers, although they were able to catch up
somewhat on this front.
EU Forecast
euf:ba18.d:38/nws-01