Banks, Financial Crisis and Capitalism
I was reading recently an article regarding the imminent bankrupcy of the emerging markets (especially the ones from Eastern Europe). The author said in his investment blog that banks are now forcing up the interest rates in those countries. The increase in the interest rates would lead to a wave of personal bankrupcies in those markets, allowing the foreign investors to buy the local assets (especially the real estate assets from those emerging markets) very cheap. The scenario would be unfolding as we speak, whilst the peak of the crisis in the Eastewrn Europe should arrive somewhere in the middle of 2010.
The fallacies of this story are many. I will not enter into the details of the cosnpiration theory which seems to hide behind this pessimistic approach to the Eastern Europe economies. I will also not discuss here the fact that it is hard for the big banks to cooperate among them. Or the bank cooperating with the big investment funds, their competitors, would be a highly unlike - ier scenario. I will just mention the recent lessons that Dubai and Greece, two sovereign countries, whose recent developments are linked tot tourism and real estate investmentst, taught us.
In such a bad environment, where travelling and tourism are down more than 20% vs. 2008 (and last year was a bad one too), Accor continues toplan for expansion. It has recently announced plans to expand further its business. Accor, Europe’s largest hotelier, plans to set aside 100 million euros ($132.8 million) a year to buy hotels put up for sale as a result of the global downturn, the group’s chief financial officer said on Sunday.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has recently published a comprehensive report called “Global Financial Stability Report - Responding to the Financial Crisis and Measuring the Systemic Risk.”. The IMF paper covers the history of the recent global financial crisis, as well as the measures taken by the governments and the companies to fight against it.
The US Treasury Department is considering giving banks and investors billions of dollars in fresh incentives to modify troubled mortgages and save homeowners from foreclosure, sources familiar with official deliberations said.
This looks kind of obvious, but when it comes from a markets guru such as the IMF managing Director Dominique Strauss Kahn it can be taken quite seriously. The Director also mentioned that the first recovery will come in the first two quarters of the next year.