Hugo Dixon

One reason the euro zone is in such a mess is that it hasn’t had the courage to clean up its banks. The United States gave its lenders a proper scrubbing, followed by recapitalisation, in 2009. By contrast, the euro zone engaged in a series of half-hearted stress tests that missed many of the biggest banking problems such as those in Ireland, Spain and Cyprus.

In recent years, the zone has started to address these problems on a piecemeal basis. But it is still haunted by zombie banks, which are not strong enough to support an economic recovery.

The European Central Bank now has a golden opportunity to press the reset button in advance of taking on the job of supervisor in mid-2014. It mustn’t flunk the cleanup.

Mario Draghi, the ECB president, is alive to the opportunity and the threat. His fear is that, even if the supervisor does its job properly, there won’t be a safety net for troubled banks that can’t recapitalise themselves. This is why he called on governments last week to make an explicit commitment to provide such a “backstop”.

Draghi highlighted the contrast between the U.S. stress test, in which Washington committed to plug any balance-sheet holes, and the last European stress test conducted by the European Banking Authority in 2011 which lacked such a commitment by governments. The U.S. test launched its economy on the road to recovery; the EBA one triggered a new phase in the crisis.

Cyprus is no longer centre stage. Nicosia has agreed a 10 billion euro bailout deal with its euro zone partners and the International Monetary Fund. A visible bank run has been averted by stringent capital controls. International markets, which only ever suffered a mild bout of jitters, have calmed down.

But it would be foolish to forget about Cyprus. The small Mediterranean island is edging towards euro exit. Quitting the single currency would devastate wealth, fuel inflation, lead to default and leave Cyprus friendless in a troubled neighbourhood. Even so, the longer capital controls continue, the louder the voices calling for bringing back the Cyprus pound will grow.

President Nicos Anastasiades is against Cyprus leaving the euro. But the main opposition communist party wants to pull out. A smaller opposition group wants to stay in the euro but kick out the troika – the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF. The country’s influential archbishop is also critical of the troika.

The “resolution” of Cyprus’ banks is a bad joke. Resolution is one of the new buzzwords in financial regulation. The practice is supposed to stop taxpayers having to bail out banks, while imposing pain fairly on shareholders and creditors.

In Cyprus, Greek deposits and favoured groups at home are exempt from haircuts, while other groups of depositor are hammered even harder. It’s anything but fair.

The resolution of Cyprus’ banks doesn’t matter just for those directly affected. It is one of the most ambitious cases of cross-border resolution since the financial crisis began. So a bad result here is hardly a good advertisement for the technique.

The Cypriot catastrophe shows just how far away the euro zone is from creating its much-touted “banking union”. There was no euro zone supervision of Cyprus’ big banks, no transnational approach to put them into controlled bankruptcy, no common deposit insurance and no flow of bank rescue funds from abroad.

Instead, there was weak supervision by the Central Bank of Cyprus and a mad scramble to carve up the banks’ assets on national lines. Nicosia was left to shoulder the whole cost of protecting small depositors and the euro zone said that none of its bailout cash could be injected into the troubled banks.

Optimists hope the fiasco will provide the euro zone with the impetus to complete its banking union. But it is equally possible that core countries such as Germany, Finland and the Netherlands will become even more reluctant to absorb the liabilities of bust peripheral banks.

Cyprus’ capital controls are an “omnishambles”. If the Argentine-style “corralito” really can be lifted in seven days, the damage could be contained. But that doesn’t seem credible. Extended controls could spawn bribery, sap confidence, further crush the economy, spread contagion and ultimately lead to the country’s exit from the euro.

The lesson of capital controls elsewhere is that, once they are imposed, they are hard to remove. Iceland’s curbs are still in place five years after they started. In Argentina, they lasted a year.

There’s little reason to suppose it will be much different in Nicosia. After all, the restrictions – which limit both the amount of money people can take from their banks and the amount they can transfer abroad – have been imposed because the lenders do not have enough access to ready funds. If there’s not sufficient liquidity today, why should anybody believe there will be enough in a week, a month or even a year?

Cyprus’ economy is going to suffer terribly in the next few years. Some of that is inevitable given how bloated the banking system had become. But the disastrous handling of the crisis, especially in the past week, will make things much worse.

That said, the bailout deal that Cyprus reached with its euro zone partners in the early hours of Monday morning makes the best of an extremely bad job – both for the small Mediterranean island and its rescuers.

It establishes three important principles. First, there will be no losses for insured deposits. Last week’s aborted deal foolishly involved taxing them at 6.75 percent. Second, uninsured creditors rather than taxpayers will pay the entire cost of bailing out Cyprus’ two troubled banks – Cyprus Popular Bank (CPB) and Bank of Cyprus (BOC). Third, Cyprus’ oversized banking sector, which depended heavily on somewhat dubious Russian cash, will be slimmed down.

The Cypriots have an expression: eninboro allo. It means: I cannot take any more of it.

There was jubilation last night outside the small Mediterranean island’s parliament when every single MP either voted against a plan to tax depositors or abstained. The message was that people of Cyprus had had enough and weren’t going to let the big bullies, led by Germany, boss them around.

The plan to tax insured deposits was a dreadful mistake – I have described it as legalised bank robbery. But the deposit tax was part of an unpalatable but available 10 billion euro bailout, agreed with the euro zone. That plan A is now at risk. As Cypriots contemplate possible plan Bs, their jubilation may start to fade: all of them are also dreadful.

Should an investment bank worry about a client’s motive when it engages in a complex and potentially suspicious transaction?

Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS) has been just such a client. The Italian bank, which has just been rescued by the state, engaged in a series of fiendishly complex deals with Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan and Nomura which had the effect of giving a misleading picture of its finances.

One controversy relates to how MPS paid for its acquisition of Antonveneta, another Italian bank, in 2008. JPMorgan helped finance part of the deal by selling 1 billion euros in so-called FRESH notes, a type of bond convertible into MPS equity. But the Bank of Italy objected that they were not sufficiently loss-absorbing and insisted that MPS only pay money to JPMorgan to forward onto the investors if it made a profit.

When euro zone governments agreed last year to give the European Central Bank the power to supervise its banks, that looked like another victory for its president Mario Draghi. It is more like a poisoned chalice.

The ECB will certainly get a chunk of extra power. But it will also be blamed when banks run into trouble, as they inevitably will. Draghi himself is experiencing this first hand following the scandal at Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS), which has had to be rescued by the Italian state. He has been lambasted for failing to supervise the country’s third largest bank properly when he ran the Bank of Italy – although the criticism seems overdone and has often been fuelled by his political opponents back in Rome.

The potential reputational risks for the ECB from banking snarl-ups on its watch are probably even bigger than they are for national central banks. This is because it doesn’t yet have the full set of tools to do the job properly. Moreover, a huge amount is at stake since the ECB is the euro zone’s most credible institution. If its reputation gets tarnished because of perceived supervisory failures, that could rub off on its ability to conduct monetary policy or manage crises effectively.

The Monte dei Paschi di Siena saga is not just an Italian affair. Revelations that complex financial transactions used by the country’s third largest bank had the effect of hiding losses are causing a political storm in Italy.

With a general election only weeks away, Silvio Berlusconi looks like being the main winner from the political spat. The former prime minister’s camp has attacked Pierluigi Bersani’s Democratic Party, which is leading in the opinion polls, for being close to Monte dei Paschi (MPS). It has also criticised Mario Monti, the current prime minister, who agreed to increase MPS’s bailout to 3.9 billion euros.

The scandal won’t be enough to get Berlusconi back as prime minister. But it could prevent a Bersani-Monti coalition from running the country with a solid majority in both houses of parliament. If so, fears about Italian political risk could return to haunt the markets.