Sweden

A European banking giant just snubbed one of the world’s strictest financial supervisors by moving to a more accommodating regulatory setting, Bloomberg News reported. Nordea Bank AB’s decision to relocate its headquarters from Sweden to Finland puts the Nordic region’s only global systemically important bank inside the euro zone. After months of railing against Swedish efforts to make banks pay more to protect taxpayers, Nordea estimates its decision to go to Helsinki will save it as much as $1.3 billion in regulatory costs.

When the biggest Nordic bank turned its subsidiaries into branches, regulators in Finland, Denmark and Norway complained they were left with too-big-to fail operations but no power to rein them in. Oversight was instead left to Sweden. But the full consequences of Nordea Bank AB’s decision to consolidate its Nordic operations are only gradually becoming clear, Bloomberg News reported. In a step that’s expected to be copied elsewhere in the European Union, Stockholm-based Nordea’s restructuring was completed on Jan. 1 after long talks with the relevant Nordic authorities.

The crisis at Ericsson deepened on Wednesday when the world’s biggest maker of mobile network equipment reported a 94 per cent plunge in quarterly operating profit and tumbling sales, the Irish Times reported. The Swedish company is struggling with a drop in spending by telecoms companies, with new 5G technology still years away, and stiff competition from Finland’s Nokia and China’s Huawei. Its shares dropped more than 15 per cent to an eight year low in early trading after it missed analysts’ forecasts for a fifth straight quarter, and said it saw no sign of a quick upturn.

Ericsson AB plans to cut 3,000 jobs in Sweden, a fifth of the workforce in its home country, as it curbs production to cope with shifting technology and stagnant demand for wireless-network equipment. The company will reduce manufacturing in the towns of Boraas and Kumla - a move it signalled last month - as it turns its focus to software development, the Irish Times reported.

The Swedish Riksbank is increasingly nervous that its 16-month experiment with negative interest rates is yielding the kind of undesired byproduct that textbooks often predict: a real-estate bubble. Stockholm has become one of Europe’s hottest property markets, one where prices rose 14% last year and money keeps flowing thanks to the central bank’s ultraloose interest rate of minus-0.5%. To cool demand for mortgage loans, the Riksbank had been planning to start increasing interest rates by the middle of next year.

Since the financial crisis, it has been gospel for many investors that some combination of actions by central banks — bond buying, bold promises or flirtations with negative interest rates — would be enough to keep the global economy out of recession, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported.

Sweden’s decision yet again to take the regulatory high ground is proving awkward for much of the rest of Europe. A director at the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority last week dared to question the status quo of letting banks treat sovereign bonds as though they couldn’t default. For Sweden, the move will probably only result in a modest increase in bank capital needs, but the political statement behind the decision is significant, Bloomberg News reported.

The Federal Reserve’s inaction last week remains the main driver of market sentiment, at least for now — but attention will soon turn toward potential action at other central banks, the Financial Times reported. Not least in Sweden, where the Riksbank faces a further test of its monetary policy mettle. It has taken rates more deeply into negative territory than any other central bank in the developed world, reversing a series of rate increases made in 2010-2011. The about-face came as the effects of the wider, global financial crisis proved more stubborn than it expected.

Sweden’s central bank governor has warned that new crisis-busting tools policymakers are embracing around the world to counter asset bubbles and other financial dangers are susceptible to political inaction and turf wars, the Financial Times reported today. Stefan Ingves, governor of the Riksbank, said so-called macroprudential policies — such as capital requirements and leverage limits — had so far failed in Sweden where house prices and personal debt levels have soared to record levels.

Sweden’s central bank on Wednesday promised to expand its quantitative easing programme and hinted it could cut what is already the world’s lowest lending rate even further to support the country’s economic recovery and revive inflation, the Financial Times reported. The Riksbank pledged to buy between SKr40bn and SKr50bn ($4.8bn-$6bn) of government bonds, taking the total stock of Swedish sovereign debt the central bank holds to between SKr80bn and SKr90bn. Once the central bank completes the purchases, it will own up to 15 per cent of all Swedish government debt.