Word: czechs
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...resulted from the inexperience of Czech bankers and a misguided semiprivatization in which a percentage of shares in leading banks was distributed to citizens through vouchers. That approach produced a deadly cocktail of limited accountability and poor lending practices. The recent spate of bank sell-offs promises to minimize new losses. "This is the end of crony capitalism," says Pavel Kavanek, CEO of the recently privatized Czechoslovak Commercial Bank (CSOB). "The name of the game now is impartial lending." A majority stake in CSOB was sold to Belgium's KBC Bank in mid-1999 for roughly $1 billion. Last February...
Since the collapse of Communism, capitalism has had an uneven triumph in the republics of Central and Eastern Europe. In the Czech Republic, which became an independent nation in 1993 after Slovakia broke away, not much changed for years, despite partial privatization of state enterprises. State-owned banks, very slow to privatize, doled out credit without much supervision, and old-fashioned state enterprises dominated the wheezing economy. One result: a three-year contraction of GDP from 1997 through...
Things quit working in December 1998, when the top management at Czech Savings (CS), the country's third biggest bank, said it would go broke in 14 days if the state didn't prop it up. The price tag: at least $100 million. The top bankers were fired, and the government decided to sell all its banks, and fast. The new strategy was too late to spare taxpayers more than $5.1 billion in losses for shoring up the banking sector over the past decade...
Dancer premiered in May and won the Palme D'or at Cannes; it unsurprisingly was met with considerable boos and has critics and viewers alike divided on its status as groundbreaking art or inane melodrama. The movie centers around Selma (Bjork), a Czech factory and single mother who is gradually going blind. She endures ordeal after ordeal in an attempt to pay for her son Gene's operation, who we are told will develop the same eye disease as Selma. In order to escape the agony and torment of her own worsening condition, she finds relief in musicals. She goes...
...meetings of the IMF and World Bank. Trevor Manuel may be South Africa's internationally respected finance minister, but a little over a decade ago he was still on the wrong end of the tear gas and water cannon as a firebrand anti-apartheid leader. The conference's host, Czech president Vaclav Havel may be feeling a little nostalgic, too - after all, back in '68 he was just another Absurdist playwright trying to overthrow the system...