Word: spain
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...roots and Catherine the Great among its historic clients, playing a role in last fall's $100 billion takeover of Dutch rival ABN Amro was a big moment. In the largest financial services deal ever signed, Fortis - part of a consortium alongside the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Spain's Santander - put up $34 billion in return for ABN's Dutch banking business, among other assets...
...billion dollar losses and complex financial assets, Santander's fortunes speak to the advantages of a simpler approach. Spain's largest bank "lends to their clients, takes deposits from their clients, and runs a network of branches," says Antonio Ramirez, analyst at investment bank Keefe, Bruyette & Woods in London. "It's quite simple, quite traditional." Focused on retail banking, with limited investment banking operations, and with a long-buoyant domestic market to lean on, Santander side-stepped the toxic assets caught up in the collapse of the U.S. sub-prime mortgage market. Enjoying "good growth at home, they were never...
...though that domestic market looks wobbly - growth in Spain is set to tumble this year, with the country's red-hot real estate market, buoyed by a decade-long boom, now chilling - analysts expect Santander to emerge in decent health. Though defaults as a portion of its total loans hit 1.3% in the first half of the year, versus 0.8% over the same period last year, mortgage-lending policies in Spain are typically more conservative than in the U.K., for instance...
...here too, Spain's regulators have encouraged sensible behavior. For years, banks have been required to put aside cash to cover expected future losses, not actual ones. The Bank of Spain "thought that in the good times it makes sense to build a cushion for the bad times," says Ramirez. So while Spain enters a downturn "a significant portion of the potential deterioration [for banks] will be covered by these provisions." There are no guarantees, of course, for Santander or anyone else, in today's parlous international environment. But for now, at least, Spain offers a lesson in prudence through...
...future direction of Austrian policy. Already the country has turned sharply against an E.U. constitution; even the Social Democrats have said that no new document would be approved without a popular referendum, which would almost certainly fail. The number of immigrants entering Austria is small compared to that of Spain and some other E.U. countries. But Strache nevertheless got traction with his calls for curbs on "criminal immigrants," including implanting electronic chips in anyone convicted of a crime to allow the authorities to monitor their movements...