More bad news from banks: even the Germans are doing bailouts

After berating other governments for rescuing their own banks, the Germans have bailed out Commerzbank to the tune of over €18bn. As Tim Bennett explains, that's bad news for investors.

So the credit crunch is largely behind us, and now all we have to do is worry about the recession, right? Well, no. The credit crunch is alive and well, and its latest big victim is Commerzbank. And yes, you read that right: it's a German bank.

Having chastised other western governments for injecting state capital into ailing banks to the tune of £37bn in the case of the UK German chancellor Angela Merkel is eating humble pie. That's because having injected €8.2bn of capital into Commerzbank in November, the German government has just handed over another €10bn.

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Tim graduated with a history degree from Cambridge University in 1989 and, after a year of travelling, joined the financial services firm Ernst and Young in 1990, qualifying as a chartered accountant in 1994.

He then moved into financial markets training, designing and running a variety of courses at graduate level and beyond for a range of organisations including the Securities and Investment Institute and UBS. He joined MoneyWeek in 2007.