European Union regulators are at pains to emphasise the rigorous nature of the bank stress tests designed to boost confidence in the European banking sector amid concerns about sovereign-debt exposures, but they ignore two key parameters.

The supervisors say their tests are tougher, in terms of their economic growth assumptions, than those carried out by the US financial authorities in early 2009, which concluded that 10 of the 19 big US banks needed $75bn (€58.3bn) of extra capital.