… and So Did the European Banks

Abstract

Pre-crisis blindness was not confined to the US: there were plenty of heads-in- the-sand in the UK and on the Continent. In fact, some of the biggest European banks got it quite wrong, including household names like RBS, HSBC, HBOS, and Barclays of the UK, once-bulletproof Swiss behemoth UBS, Benelux giant Fortis, and even the leading light of German banking, Deutsche Bank. And a bunch of smaller, more specialized, banks like Northern Rock, Bradford & Bingley, Sachsen Landesbank, and IKB got it wrong, too.