Measuring Systemic Stress in European Banking Systems

We construct a measure of systemic risk in selected EU banking systems using an indirect measure of the system covariance which is also time-varying. We proceed to examine to what extent the resulting measures of systemic stress provide a convincing narrative of events during the period January 2000 to March 2016. The results provide evidence of: (i) rising stress prior to the outbreak of the international financial crisis in 2007/08 in countries with banks exposed to toxic assets; (ii) stress associated with the euro area sovereign debt crisis from 2009/10; and (iii) continued concerns from 2013 out the need for euro area banks to clean up their balance sheets and raise new capital at a time of sluggish profitability.