“The stress test exercise – summary report. “The 2011 EBA’s EU wide stress test had the objective of assessing the resilience of a large sample of banks in the EU1 against an adverse but plausible scenario. The scenario assesses banks against a deterioration from the baseline forecast in the main macroeconomic variables such as GDP, unemployment and house prices – for instance, GDP would fall 4 percentage points from the baseline. The scenario includes a sovereign stress, with haircuts applied to sovereign and bank exposures in the trading book and increased provisions for these exposures in the banking book. Changes in interest rates and sovereign spreads also affect the cost of funding for banks in the stress. The stress testing methodology, which was published by the EBA on March 18th, 20112, entails a static balance-sheet assumption, and also does not allow the banks to take actions to react to shock. The resilience of the banks is assessed against a benchmark defined with reference to capital of the highest quality — Core Tier 1 (CT1) — set at 5% of risk weighted assets (RWA).”

• EBA Press release
• Opening Statement
• Stress Test Related Documents – Additional guidance to the methodological note