Word: banking
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...whether the current uproar will permanently tarnish the citizens' image of their country or diminish the confidence in the banking sector remains to be seen. "Right now, everybody is upset because UBS messed up," says Georg Lutz, a political scientist at Lausanne's Foundation for Research in Social Sciences. But Lutz points out that the Swiss had rebounded from scandals and corporate downfalls before, such as the controversy in the 1990s surrounding the dormant Holocaust bank accounts, or the collapse, in 2001, of Switzerland's former national airline. "At that time we were upset too, but we got over...
Perhaps. For now, though, Swiss citizens have decided that their financial institutions are no longer something they can bank on. In Switzerland, that's revolutionary...
...just minerals Beijing is now frantic to buy. On March 3, China National Petroleum Corp. agreed to buy Calgary based Verenex Energy, which has a 50% stake in a huge Libyan oilfield, for $390 million. The China Development Bank and China Petroleum & Oil Corp. last month invested $10 billion in Petrobras, Brazil's state-owned oil company and the prime operator in one of the most promising new offshore fields in the world. The deal gives Petrobras capital to further develop the fields. In return, China will get 100,000 to 160,000 barrels of oil a day over...
...gloom gripping other cities in the world. Take Efigênia Francisca da Silva, who exudes middle-class expectations and remains positive despite the tsunami of bad news. Thanks to a government scheme to encourage entrepreneurs, the once dirt-poor housewife has received some $8,000 in low-interest bank credits in recent years and now owns three shops that sell everything from shampoo to public-transit tickets. "I didn't have a bank account before," says Da Silva, 37, standing beneath graffiti-covered walls and pirated power lines. "I never had a car. I bought a Fiat Palio." Does...
...past few months, though, Kapitalizm's jaws have snapped shut. The global credit crunch has hit the economies of Eastern Europe hard. In Hungary and Latvia the International Monetary Fund has stepped in with emergency aid. (Latvia's government collapsed anyway.) Currencies have crashed, leading the European Central Bank to help Hungarians and Poles keep paying their foreign currency-denominated mortgages by pumping in euros. The fear now is that the region's banks could collapse, especially if Western banks yank credit lines to eastern subsidiaries. Such a move would be counterproductive. Western banks, particularly in places such as Austria...