Word: banking
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...Recent events in wealthy and relatively healthy Hong Kong show just how nervous Asians have become. On Oct. 2, shares of Hong Kong's Hang Seng Bank plunged 8.9% after word began circulating it could suffer losses related to the failure of Washington Mutual in the U.S. Hang Seng officials announced the bank holds senior debt securities issued by WaMu, but called its exposure "immaterial." In September, hundreds of depositors lined up at branches of Hong Kong's Bank of East Asia after false rumors spread that the bank was in financial trouble. The run was stemmed after the bank...
...European bank stocks continued to take a beating on Tuesday following a series of ad hoc steps by national governments to try to shore up confidence in financial institutions. By the day's close, Britain's troubled HBOS was down 41.5%, and the Royal Bank of Scotland's shares had lost 39% of their value; Germany's Commerzbank fell 14%, and Deutsche Bank was down 8.9%. The pummeling followed a black Monday in which stock exchanges across Europe dropped as much as 9%, suggesting that the markets were casting a doleful eye on the $700 billion U.S. bailout package passed...
...Europe was looking askance not just at the U.S., but also at tiny Iceland, whose government on Monday completed what amounts to an emergency seizure of its oversized banking sector. Prime Minister Geir Haarde went on television Monday night to warn his compatriots that "the Icelandic economy, in the worst case, could be sucked with the banks into the whirlpool, and the result could be bankruptcy." That's not just talk: Iceland's GDP amounts to less than one-tenth of the total assets of its three biggest banks, all of which are in trouble. British financial authorities warned...
...scary conditions elsewhere hardly drew attention away from the underlying weakness in Europe's own supervision of its financial institutions. Most of the continent is conjoined into a political union of 27 countries, 15 of which use the euro under the monetary authority of the European Central Bank. But as the recent days' fraught activity has proved, coordination between governments on fiscal and supervisory measures remains strictly voluntary...
...Europe's bank-by-bank, country-by-country fixes of its endangered banks have so far failed to bolster the confidence of investors and depositors. "Europe must prepare to put in place a collective line of defense," Dominique Strauss-Kahn, director-general of the International Monetary Fund, said in a speech in Paris on Monday. "The stability of the world economy is at stake...