Chart of the Day: The World’s Top 50 Banks (bubble chart version)
I have written a few posts showing you the ranking for the big banks globally, with a special emphasis on Europe because of systemic risk.
But here’s a great bubble chart that gives you a visual on the relative size of the big banks globally. (Hat tip Barry Ritholtz). Of the large countries on this page, the one’s with the largest banks relative to the size of the domestic economy are Britain, and France. Small countries like Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium and Australia have even larger banks relative to their domestic economy.
The Swiss have decided to deal with this by imposing stringent capital requirements, rather than breaking up their two big banks as Willem Buiter, now of Citi, and Swiss banking experts like Manuel Amman have called for. On the other hand, the others have not done that much in this direction.
Interesting. There are comments about how out of balance the UK banking sector is as a share of the economy. From this chart, I would say that Belgium, Switzerland and Romania are even more vulnerable.