Word: banking
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Savov at Credit Suisse says the banking problems could slow domestic investment and industrial growth. But significantly, Russia's most important banks don't appear to be at risk - in fact, their conservative behavior, rather than risky practices, may be holding the economy back. About 40% of the nation's deposits is in the hands of three stodgy institutions with strong ties to the Kremlin - Sberbank, VTB and Gazprombank - that have been increasingly loath to lend to some 1,200 scrappy, smaller rivals. This is contributing to the liquidity squeeze. "It's the second- and third-league firms and banks...
...days on Sept. 16 after it lost 17% of its value in a matter of hours. At that point the market was down almost 60% for the year, its lowest level since early 2006, although it has since been boosted by measures taken by the Russian central bank and the Kremlin. Those measures, however, weren't enough to shore up the nation's largest investment bank, Renaissance Capital, which on Sept. 21 sold a 50% stake to the Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov for $500 million. Just over a month ago, Forbes magazine, in a profile of Renaissance...
...back in 1998," says Eric Berglof, chief economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London, who reckons the financial-market problems will result in a "smallish blip" in the economy rather than any bigger meltdown. Certainly, the situation today is very different from a decade ago, he and others point out: Russia currently has a whopping $550 billion in foreign-currency reserves, a hefty budget surplus, a negligible national debt and an economy that remains on course to grow by 7% this year. The fount of much of the nation's newfound wealth...
...Some Russia watchers are expecting much more upheaval. Vladimir Savov, an analyst for Credit Suisse in Moscow, sees the recent turmoil as the beginning of a broad consolidation of Russia's highly-leveraged banking sector. "We want to hope that this will improve the resilience of Russia's financial markets in the long term," he says, "although in the near term the process could be painful." Renaissance says it had been in talks for some time and didn't act out of distress. But its move came a few days after the first financial institution fell victim to the crisis...
...have institutions that have been allowed to become too big to fail because we had all kinds of flaws in our financial infrastructure, in the whole way over-the-counter derivatives work. We don't have the necessary laws or powers to deal with failing non-bank institutions. If they're a big bank, the depositor has deposit insurance and the regulators can wind them down without throwing them into bankruptcy...