Mateusz Morawiecki, the Polish Prime Minister, has said that the Polish banking system is safe despite anxiety in the financial markets caused by concerns over the health of the global banking sector.
The share prices of banks across Europe have fallen recently following a rushed takeover of Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse and the collapse of two US banks.
“The Polish banking system is safe,” Morawiecki told reporters after a meeting with Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank (ECB), in Brussels on March 24.
“Our banking sector is very highly capitalised,” the Prime Minister said, adding that as the country was not a member of the eurozone “Poland has been managing its own currency”.
“And this has been working to our advantage,” he said.
Morawiecki made the statement when asked whether he had spoken with the ECB president about the difference between the Swiss and EU banking systems in the light of the recent problems of Credit Suisse.
“I asked Ms Lagarde what should be done to improve the reliability of the entire system so that European citizens should not worry about their deposits,” he said.
“In fact, one of my questions concerned stress tests,” Morawiecki said, adding that Credit Suisse had undergone them without a problem, and shortly after it faced bankruptcy.
On March 19, UBS agreed to buy rival Swiss bank Credit Suisse for 3 billion Swiss francs in stock, and agreed to assume up to 5 billion francs in losses, in a shotgun merger engineered by the Swiss authorities to avoid more market-shaking turmoil in the global banking sector.
Earlier in March, the US saw the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank based in California and the New York Signature Bank. (PAP/Business World Magazine)
