Who's Next? Italy's Monte Paschi Admits To Billions In Deposit Outflows | Zero Hedge

'It appears, given news from Italy today, that European depositors are increasingly coming to therealization that deposits in their local bank are not 'safe' places to put their spare cash, but are in fact loans to extremely leveraged businesses. In a somewhat wishy-washy, 'hide-the-truth'-like statement on Monte dei Paschi's website, the CEO admits to, "the withdrawal of several billion in deposits." Of course, the reasons why these depositors withdrew their capital from the oldest bank in the world will never be known though of course he blames it on "reputational damage" from their derivative cheating scandal.

Apparently the fact that this happened to come about six week after said scandal and the bank's third bailout, and that the prior two bailouts did not result in such an outflow of unsecured liabilities (at least not to the public's knowledge), was lost on the senior management, as was lost that a far greater catalyst may have been the slightly more troubling events in Cyprus in the second half of March. Unsurprisingly, as Reuters notes, the CEO declined to give a forecast on the level of deposits at the end of the first quarter of 2013; no wonder given the bank just doubled its expectations for bad loans and the 'Cypriot Solution' dangling over uninsured depositor hordes.

Customers' deposits at Italian bank Monte dei Paschi fell by "a few billion euros" ... the bank said in a document posted on its web site on Saturday.'

First Cyprus, now Italy, next?
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-03-30/whos-next-italys-monte-paschi-admits-billions-deposit-outflows