Belgian government officials met with shareholders Monday to discuss the bank's health and whether it might require a rescue.
And in Italy, the board of Unicredit Bank, whose top manager pronounced it solid only a week ago, negotiated an emergency package over the weekend to raise $4 billion in new capital and proposed to pay investor dividends with new shares rather than cash.
There was still no prospect, however, of a Europe-wide bailout package akin to the $700-billion American plan approved last week. Although France has floated such a proposal, opposition from Germany, Europe's biggest economy, has kept the idea from gaining traction.
"We as Germans do not want to pay into a big pot where we do not have control and do not know where German money might be used," German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck said in a radio interview.
The European Union has shown little appetite or ability to act as a collective, despite assurances Monday by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who currently holds the EU presidency, that "European leaders recognize the necessity of close coordination and cooperation."
But Bickley, the economist, said: "Where you've got a problem on the spot and you have to deal with it, you do it, and European cooperation can go hang." The region's leaders "are putting out fires. . . . But it is still ad hoc."
Bickley said the sudden focus on protecting individual deposits would not address the problem at the root of the credit crunch: the unwillingness by banks to lend to one another. "What we have to do is rebuild banks' trust in each other, and depositor protection isn't going to do that."
What he and other analysts view as more promising is a round of capital injections into ailing banks. An interest rate cut by the European Central Bank could also help. But whether those measures come to pass remains to be seen.
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henry.chu@latimes.com
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Times staff writers Maria De Cristofaro in Rome, Patrick J. McDonnell and Andres D'Alessandro in Buenos Aires, Sebastian Rotella in Madrid, Borzou Daragahi in Beirut and Megan K. Stack in Moscow contributed to this report.
