Search results for

On July 4 the Russian cabinet approved a new banking strategy to cover the development of the sector over the next four to five years.

The mini bank crisis Russians faced in the summer has underscored the urgent need for bank sector reform and the creation of a system that can respond to the credit needs of businesses and individuals.

Germany breached the EU's budget deficit limit of 3% of GDP over the first six months of this year and will almost certainly break the terms of the European stability pact that underpins the euro for the third year in a row. In fact, the government managed to run a 4% budget deficit over the first half of this year, slightly higher than the 3.9% for the end of 2003, federal statistics office Destatis revealed last month.

Russia's economy is roaring up the growth curve but dependence on oil revenues, insufficient diversification into other activities and a growing gap between the well-off and the poor give cause for concern.

By Camilla Palladino

No matter how successful the Argentine exchange offer is, there will always be holdouts ? investors that refuse to enter into the exchange in the hope of getting a better deal later. Many investors are worried about these holders of original debt. Will they pose a credible threat of seizing coupon payments on Argentina's new bonds? If they do, they could keep Argentina in financial purgatory, without access to investment, and with artificially high bond spreads because of the risk of coupon attachment, even though a supermajority of creditors had agreed to a restructuring. Reassuringly, the answer is that the holdout threat is probably not all that credible, although nobody knows for sure.

Investors ask tough questions these days about companies' ability to honour their commitments. After all, no-one wants to fall victim to the next corporate scandal. But Toys “R” Us shareholders and bondholders are safe, aren't they? Surely official “spokesanimal” Geoffrey the Giraffe and chums won't let them down.

There's an obvious appeal in linking your brand with the Olympic ethos of excellence and achievement, as the likes of John Hancock, Visa and Greece's own Alpha Bank did at last month's Athens Games. Other sponsorships are harder to work out. Standard Bank of South Africa, for example, is sponsoring a dead whale. Misty is, or was, a southern right whale (Eubalaena australis) that came off second best in a collision with a ship and washed up near Cape Town. As Standard Bank says in a grisly press release: ?Decomposition set in and her rotting 70-ton body became a source of controversy. It was decided to implode the carcass but [residents] persuaded the powers to allow them to remove the rotting flesh to preserve the skeleton.

General Motors Asset Management (GMAM), which has about $148 billion in assets under management, invests in structured credit. Its Promark Alternative High Yield fund has primarily bought CDO equity tranches.

Senior bankers who quit their jobs on the pretext of pursuing new interests often quickly emerge in a similar role. Not so Manfred Schepers, who left UBS last June after 17 years. He said he was leaving to consider new banking roles but that his first priority was a good break. He meant it.

South Africa has built stable macroeconomic foundations since the overthrow of apartheid but its potential as a regional leader is still hampered by corporate rigidities, untapped talent reflected in high unemployment, an Aids epidemic and a failure to attract inward investment.

MBNA Europe's delinked programme should help Europe's ABS issuers to respond to investor demand