Word: bankes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...Instead, the banks went out and raised capital from private sources, including $65 billion in a matter of weeks. On June 2, Bank of America announced that it had raised $33 billion of the $33.9 billion the feds were requiring it to. JPMorgan announced new plans to sell stock. Part of the motivation for the banks is to get out from under government constraints - Congress has passed strict limits on executive salaries, bonuses and other benefits bankers love to love...
...turns out, that's part of the reason the banks are still resisting selling into the public-private program. "The government plan continues to face a number of hurdles, including too much government overhang," says Scott Talbott of the industry group Financial Services Roundtable. Government officials say the language in a recent Senate bill requiring recipients of government "public-private" dollars to submit to oversight by the special investigator of bank-bailout funds is scaring away both sides of potential deals. "We've run into reluctance on the part of buyers and sellers," says an official. (See pictures of retailers...