Nine euro zone banks ate into their capital buffers last year, making use of leeway granted by supervisors to help them cope with the fallout of the coronavirus outbreak, the ECB said on Thursday. The ECB did not name the nine banks in its annual review of lenders on its watch but a chart in the report showed four of them barely met their requirements even after taking into account the pandemic-relief measures.These allowed banks to use some of their capital buffers to absorb losses until the end of 2022, so that they wouldn’t cut lending to the economy instead. “Banks with low capital headroom, that is with a small ... (full story)