Word: asianized
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Paul Schulte, a former Lehman Brothers star analyst who is now with Japan's Nomura (which took over bankrupt Lehman's Asian operations), recently compared bank balance sheets in various countries and discovered significant differences. One telling disparity is leverage. The higher the leverage, the greater the risk, and despite efforts to put them on sounder financial footing, U.S. and European banks remain overstretched by historical standards and relative to their peers. (See the top 10 bankruptcies...
...money to buy them? Nomura found that Asia's banks are significantly underleveraged, meaning they have plenty of muscle for acquisitions. China's leverage ratio is 15.8, Hong Kong's is 14.3, India's is 11.6, South Korea's is 16.7. Having gone through rehab after the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the region's financial institutions went into the current Great Recession with robust balance sheets that they can now leverage up by acquiring the assets that Western banks are shedding. China's banks are in a particularly sweet spot. Grown fat on years of sizzling GDP growth, Bank...
...Standard Bank, South Africa's largest lender, in part to serve Chinese-owned resources companies prospecting for oil, gold, copper and other metals in places like Angola, Congo, Liberia and Zambia. ICBC is now said to be interested in the Royal Bank of Scotland's Asian assets, along with Australia's ANZ Bank and Anglo-Asian lenders HSBC and Standard Chartered Bank...
...Moreover, China’s awakening is especially worrying to its East Asian neighbors, several of whom possess or can quickly develop nuclear deterrents. As a precaution, many have already formed military pacts and strengthened their security apparatuses. India countered China’s growing sequence of bases in Central Asia and the Pacific Rim by accelerating its own production of a blue-water navy and enhancing security ties with the U.S., France, Russia, and Japan. A mutual fear of China also prompted former adversaries South Korea and Japan to start a symbiotic relationship on defense issues...
...even offshore balancing will only limit China’s power, not erase it. China still leverages its sway over North Korea to keep the West anxious, and its recent veto on a major Asian development bank project also illustrates its might...