and Santander, to weather the real estate deflation better than expected. Indeed, Spain's large commercial banks have been able to capitalize on their strong position to buy up distressed banking assets elsewhere in Europe and in the United States. Nevertheless, with the unprecedented crisis of the country's real estate sector, smaller local savings banks ("Cajas"), had been delaying the registering of bad loans, especially those backed by houses and land, to avoid declaring losses. In June 2009 the Spanish government set its banking bailout and reconstruction fund, the Fondo de reestructuración ordenada bancaria (FROB), known in English as Fund for Orderly Bank Restructuring. In the event, State intervention of local savings banks due to default risk was less than feared. On 22 May 2010, the Banco de España took over "CajaSur", as part of a national program to put the country's smaller banks on a firm financial basis. In December 2011, the Spanish central bank, Banco de España (equivalent of the US Federal Reserve), forcibly took over "Caja Mediterraneo", also known as CAM, (a regional savings bank) to prevent its financial collapse. The international accounting firm, PriceWaterhouseCooper, estimated an imbalance between CAM's assets and debts of €3,500 million, not counting the industrial corporation. The troubled situation reached its peak with the partial nationalization of Bankia in May 2012. By then it was becoming clear that the mounting real estate losses of the savings banks were undermining confidence in the country's government bonds, thus aggravating a sovereign debt crisis. In early June 2012, Spain requested European funding of €41 billion "to recapitalize Spanish banks that need it". It was not a sovereign bailout in that the funds were used only for the restructuring of the banking sector a full-fledged bailout for an economy the size of the Spanish would have reached ten or twelve times that amount). In return for the credit line etended by the EMS, there were no tax or macroeconomic conditions. As of 2017 the cost of restructuring Spain's bankrupt savings banks were estimated to have been €60.7 billion, of which nearly €41.8 billion was put up by the state through the FROB and the rest by the banking sector. The total cost will not be fully understood until those lenders still controlled by the State (Bankia and BMN) are newly privatized. In this regard, by early 2017 the Spanish government was considering a merger of both banks