FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Britain does not face a U.S.-style subprime mortgage crisis but the Bank of England’s latest move to help out commercial banks can only be one element in easing credit market tensions, a senior International Monetary Fund official said on Monday.
Michael Deppler, director of the IMF’s European department, said after the Bank of England announced about 50 billion pounds of assistance to British banks that the main solution to the credit crisis lay in banks being more open about their losses and recapitalising.
"The UK has more the symptoms of the U.S. than have some of the continental countries. But in our view it’s wrong to simply equate the UK markets to with U.S. markets in terms of subprime and the nature of risks to mortgages," he told reporters in Frankfurt.
