Deleveraging by Western European Banks
Friday, January 20th, 2012Eastern Europe might require funds in the International Monetary Fund along with other international lenders to preempt a banking crisis as well as a shortage of credit within the region’s economies as western banks pare assets.
The IMF, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the globe Bank as well as the European Investment Bank, which spent $42 billion following your collapse of Lehman Brothers Holding Inc., should “stand prepared to provide external assistance and financial support to banks,” the Vienna Initiative band of regulators and policy makers said in the statement following a meeting inside Austrian capital on Jan. 16. The risk of “excessive and disorderly deleveraging and a credit crunch” looms over the region, the course notes said.
“There is definitely an strong impact because of this — a potentially strong impact,” EBRD’s Chief Economist Erik Berglof said within an interview throughout a Euromoney conference yesterday in Vienna. “You have the headquarters making decisions on assets which can be tiny when you glance at the total balance sheet, but when you consider the subsidiaries in eastern Europe these are systemic inside the countries where they operate.”
Regulators and policy makers are trying to shield economic increase in eastern Europe against contagion through the euro area’s deepening debt crisis. New capital and liquidity requirements for your western lenders controlling three-quarters of eastern Europe’s banking system threaten to curb credit needed to fund the region’s companies and households.’Especially Virulent’
Deleveraging by western European banks might make credit in eastern Europe scarcer, the entire world Bank’s Andrew Burns was quoted as saying in Austrian newspaper Wiener Zeitung today.
“The problem is especially virulent in eastern Europe and central Asia because those countries strongly depend upon loans from civilized world,” Burns said.
A revival with the Vienna Initiative is necessary mindful about should be a recognition that “there is still a coordination failure” between eastern and western Europe to tackle banking risks, Piroska Nagy, director of country strategy and policy with the EBRD, said in the Vienna conference.
The IMF, EIB, EBRD and also the World Bank “will engage at the heightened level with all the region,” Nagy said today in a interview, without elaborating further.