Word: sweden
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...debate sharpens in the U.S. Congress over Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's proposed $700 billion bailout package, Washington policymakers would be wise to lift their gaze beyond the Beltway and take a look at Sweden. That country has already been in this particular policy hell, during a banking crisis of its own in the early 1990s. "The basic conditions are the same," says Bo Lundgren, Sweden's Finance Minister at the time. "There was the same anxiety and the same need for confidence." He's one of a number of Swedish financial types who have been shuttling...
...funds taxpayers are being asked to spend to help get the credit markets rolling again. The idea, says Lundgren, is not to just give money, but "to get some ownership (in return), and eventually be able to get some revenue back." By taking a stake in its enfeebled banks, Sweden was able to minimize the taxpayers' burden in the long...
...Sweden's financial crisis in the early 1990s stemmed from a 1985 deregulation of credit markets, which set the stage for overexpansion and bubbles in the real estate and finance markets. When those bubbles burst in the early 1990s, Sweden's currency crumbled and interest rates spiked to 500% overnight. Of the country's seven biggest banks, five needed either government bailouts or big injections of money from shareholders. The value of the country's real estate market plunged 50-60% in 18 months. "The whole Swedish banking system was off-balance," Lundgren recalls...
...government tried several stop-gap measures to no effect and in late 1992 opted for a complete re-booting of Sweden's financial system. Conservative Prime Minister Carl Bildt's administration sat down with the center-left opposition and came up with a bipartisan, multi-tiered approach. The government issued blanket insurance for a period of four years to creditors in all the country's 114 banks. It established an agency to oversee all banks that needed recapitalization and told them to immediately write down their losses...
...have a 1 in 8 chance of dying in childbirth during their lifetime. The same miserable odds apply in Afghanistan. In the U.S., by contrast, the lifetime chance that a woman will die in childbirth is about 1 in 4,800; in Britain, 1 in 8,200; and in Sweden, 1 in 17,400. Deaths are heavily weighted to the poorest and most isolated in each country, which means that many politicians remain largely ignorant of the scale of the tragedy. "Often the people in the cities do not know what is happening in their own rural areas," says Sarah...