Should you? 

From the FT

Leading UK and continental European companies are increasingly shunning banks from Spain, Italy and even Germany because they do not believe the Europe-wide stress testing of banks gave a true picture of their financial health.

Corporate treasurers from groups with revenues of more than $240bn told the Financial Times they were conducting their own tests to gauge for themselves banks’ robustness.

“What we are increasingly concerned about is credit risk,” said the treasurer of one of Germany’s largest industrial companies. “Even after the stress tests, we have to ask ourselves: are the banks healthy? The tests have opened up more questions than they have answered, especially here in Germany.”

Stuart Siddall, chief executive of the Association of Corporate Treasurers, said companies were taking a more proactive approach to assessing how financially strong banks are: “Everybody is spending a lot more time today on counterparty risk than they did before.”

Counterparty risk – the risk that a bank will default and be unable to meet its obligations – shot up the list of concerns of companies after the Lehman Brothers collapse two years ago.

Those worries had again intensified around the time of the official European bank stress tests in July, several treasurers said.

“There is an element of whether the emperor has any clothes on and what to do if he doesn’t. The stress tests were a joke,” said the treasurer of a large European media company. ...

A treasurer at a FTSE 100 company in the UK said: “We have no business with Spanish banks and a couple of Italian and German banks. If US banks are refusing to deal with these guys, then why should we?”

I doubt this is over.