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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...
...Europe's banks are in much worse shape, with a ratio of 40.5. They must either sell $9.7 trillion in assets or raise $485 billion in capital to bring leverage down to 20. The Royal Bank of Scotland (estimated leverage: 39.3) has already started slimming down. It recently put its retail and commercial businesses in Asia on the block. New CEO Stephen Hester has announced plans to create a subsidiary that will hold about $477 billion of the bank's assets that are earmarked for disposal...
...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...
What Chinese banks are likely to do is to focus on Asia and other emerging markets, particularly in places where globalizing Chinese businesses are expanding. Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) paid $5.6 billion in 2007 for 20% of 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...
...bank plan is supposed to be getting under way right about now, with private players lining up to tap government lending facilities to buy so-called toxic assets from banks, thereby cleaning up the banks' balance sheets and facilitating lending across the country. But the banks, convinced the market was undervaluing the assets, toxic or not, have never been very enthusiastic about selling them. (See 25 people to blame for the financial crisis...