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emerging markets

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.Read More »Banks, Financial Crisis and Capitalism

IMF Reccomends Stronger Measures to Fight the Global Financial Crisis

imf-building-2The 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 report analyzes why the financial institutions have all been hit so hard by the current financial crisis, from the pension funds to the life insurance companies. These institutions were impacted despite the fact that most of them took preventive measures to manage potential surges in the risks of their assets. The report also underlines that there is a strong retrenchment from foreign markets, which outpaces strongly the overall de-leveraging process. The sharp decline of the cross border funding actuall created the crisis in the emerging markets, whilst the re-financing needs of those markets are still very large (estimated by the IMF at $1.8 trillion in 2009). Read More »IMF Reccomends Stronger Measures to Fight the Global Financial Crisis