Lloyds Banking Group chief executive Eric Daniels warned last week that were still "global concerns" about the ability of banks to finance their operations three years after the start of the credit crunch.
In the UK alone, the Bank of England calculates that the banks still have a gap of £450bn between what they lend and what they hold in deposits to support their loans. While down from the near £1 trillion at the height of the credit crunch, the sum means that banks are having to find new ways to support their loans – or face having to further reduce their lending to businesses and households.
Daniels admitted that Lloyds needs to refinance £132bn of its £600bn loan book and the City believes it is one of the biggest users of the special liquidity scheme (SLS) introduced by the Bank of England to try to ease funding pressures in the deepest days of the banking crisis.
In total the BoE has lent banks £165bn through the SLS, a system which allowed the banks to swap the instruments which had become illiquid during the credit crunch – such as mortgage-backed bonds – for high-quality government bonds. The window to use the facility – regarded by many in the City as essential to the funding of Lloyds following the HBOS acquisition – ended on 30 January last year. The banks which used the facility had three years from that date to find alternative ways to finance their businesses.
With the clock ticking on ways to keep refinancing banks, Royal Bank of Scotland has revealed that it had used £21.4bn of central banking funding – most likely the SLS – by the end of 2009. Last week RBS said it had reduced this by £4bn.
Similar schemes have been introduced in the eurozone and the US, to try to replace the funding that banks used to provide to each other in the so-called interbank market.
One bank able to claim that it has avoided being dependent on such wholesale funding is HSBC. It said: "As a net provider of funds to the interbank market HSBC has been not been significantly affected by the scarcity of interbank funding."