did, it did focus minds on the issue and to be fair the eba has published a lot of information.re aware of the situation than earlier on. perhaps the timing could have been a little bit more staggered here. of course what the eba said is you have to reach these ratios but then the banks started sending out a lot of signals they're going to do so by cutting lending and that's not what the government wanted. now a lot more pressure on banks to do it. buy capital issuance. it's going to be a difficult process. it is a manageable one. eurozone banks have been growing their international assets rapidly in recent years and they are likely to be cutting back it particularly on those assets and then i think we'll start to see other banking sectors, the chinese banking sector, the japanese, maybe the american, south american, maybe middle east. and i think globally there will be enough liquidity around but we have to deal with a situation where the eurozone banks are clearly going to be forced into some retreat. >> thanks for that. christine? >>> well, some of the other big stories we're

development, oakland metropolitan chamber of commerce, spur, emeryville chamber of commerce, and east bay eba. thank you for partnering with us. i know i will miss some of you, but let me extend a welcome to the public officials that i have been alerted are here. from the city of san francisco, the director of the mta, the executive director of the port of san francisco, the director of the office of economic and workforce development, the director of business development, office of economic workforce development. from the city of oakland, council member, district 5, city administrator, the sick -- the assistant city administrator, the executive director of the port of oakland, and the chair of the port commission. i know i have missed someone. forgive me. if someone wants to send up a card, i will acknowledge your. there it quickly, just have to mention when i have this many people in the room, a few things about the business. we had a great year. everything that is supposed to be up for us is up. hopefully that is a good economic indicator. we are off to a great start in 2012. hopefully you

. >> the eba is forcing them to sell all the good assets to raise capital. >> indeed. it's a vicious circle. that's exactly how it goes when you are approaching a credit crunch. it was the same last time the companies and the financial market participants were short of liquidity, not able to borrow from people because they had bad assets on their books. what they had to do was sell their good assets and all that's left is deteriorating. >> intimated the ltro and we have another big one. we've sort of protected the financial system from a sort of systemic collapse. >> yes, exactly. >> so that's the good news. so what are we left with? >> what we're left with is two major hurdles remain. the first hurdle was, will there be enough liquidity to prevent the system collapse to take this tail risk off the table. answer, yes, seems to be. and that's a good answer. the catastrophe has gone for now. but the two major steps remain and they're big steps. one is you have to write down the bad debts somehow or other and decide who pays for that loss if it lives -- if it's collateral

already a lot but one thing for sure they seem to be on track to close that capital gap, ross, which the eba did identify and they're down substantially saying they will meet the target by june 2012. >> patricia, thank you very much indeed for that. swiss re stock is up. carolin has the details. >> reporter: ross, it really was an excellent set of numbers. yes, there were a couple of one-offs like a tax gain but if you look at the underlying result as well, that was very, very promising. full-year net profit tripled to $2.6 billion, much better than expected. again, partly because of the tax and also much better than expected investment results. another bright spot in those numbers is the fact swiss re has had a very good start to the year, a premium volume in january, one of the most important months for renewals was up 20% and prices also rose by 4%. i wondered or i asked the cfo of swiss re earlier on whether that trend would continue. >> pricing certainly has some positive momentum currently. we've seen a fairly broad, fairly moderate market so this is not a very sharp rise in process bu

clear just from that news item that deleveraging the banks engaged in is still a long way to go and the ebas trying to get them to raise capital. people think that's not even enough. they can't do it by going to the market. they can't really do it by going to the government anymore so they're forced to deleverage and we see that the loan growth in europe across-the-board is terrible. we have that pressure. >> credit suisse will be the worst. bob, good to see you as always, chief economist at independent strategy. still one hour, of course, of program to go. i have a feeling courtney is a giants fab. i don't know why but i have that feeling. >> how did you guess? yeah, i am a giants fan. what a great game. i don't know if awed chance to see it but i was up very late in order to watch. you can't miss it. i was at a bar in new york city. i don't know what could have been better. so much fun. not quite the repeat of 2008 but the hype was still there, unbelievable. really, really great game and the halftime performance, the commercials -- >> another very close game, though. >> yes. a really, rea