SINGAPORE (Reuters) - The worst of the global financial crisis is yet to come and a large U.S. bank will fail in the next few months as the world’s biggest economy hits further troubles, former IMF chief economist Kenneth Rogoff said on Tuesday.
“The U.S. is not out of the woods. I think the financial crisis is at the halfway point, perhaps. I would even go further to say ‘the worst is to come’,” he told a financial conference.
“We’re not just going to see mid-sized banks go under in the next few months, we’re going to see a whopper, we’re going to see a big one, one of the big investment banks or big banks,” said Rogoff, who is an economics professor at Harvard University and was the International Monetary Fund’s chief economist from 2001 to 2004.
The pound has fallen to its weakest level in 12 years after the Bank of England signalled that it is no longer prepared to raise interest rates.
Sterling dipped sharply against both the dollar and the euro after the Bank used its quarterly Inflation Reportto slash its economic growth forecasts and predicted that inflation will dip back towards its 2pc target over the next two years.
Aug. 13 (Bloomberg) — The credit crisis is “broad, deep, and global” and “far from over” for financial companies even after they reported $500 billion in writedowns and credit losses, Merrill Lynch & Co.’s chief investment strategist said.Continue reading »
At least 29 states plus the District of Columbia, including several of the nation’s largest states, faced an estimated $48 billion in combined shortfalls in their budgets for fiscal year 2009 (which began July 1, 2008 in most states.) At least three other states expect budget problems in fiscal year 2010.
Asia will be infected by the economic weakness spreading through the world’s leading economies, threatening the engine of global growth, HSBC has warned.
Cashing in on Hong Kong gets harder
Speaking after reporting a “resilient” 28pc fall in pre-tax profits to $10.3bn (£5.2bn) for the six months to June, despite incurring a further $10bn of bad debt, Stephen Green, HSBC chairman, said: “I don’t believe the emerging markets have completely decoupled. There is no way a serious downturn in the US will leave Asia immune.”
HSBC, the world’s third largest bank, still expects the region to grow but it will be “with less momentum than in the recent past” because of rising inflation in the face of commodity price pressures.
Analysts at Exane BNP Paribas warned that the Asian outlook “provides the greatest threat to HSBC’s premium valuation” and that “some of the gloss has started to fade”.
NEW YORK, Aug 3 (Reuters) - The United States is in the second inning of a recession that will last for at least 18 months and help kill off hundreds of banks, influential economist and New York University Professor Nouriel Roubini told Barron’s in Sunday’s edition.
Taxpayers will pay a big price for helping bail out the rest of the financial services industry as well, Roubini said — at least $1 trillion and more likely $2 trillion.
The banks will become insolvent because of mounting losses as a result of the housing bust and because they have only written down their subprime loans so far, he said. Still in front of them are their consumer-credit losses, for which they lack the reserves, Barron’s reported.
He also said there are hundreds of millions of dollars outstanding in home-equity loans that could be worth zero, too.
Britain’s second largest bank expected to reveal it has lost £1 billion in first half
THE Royal Bank of Scotland is poised to unveil the biggest loss in UK banking history after taking a hit of almost £6 billion from the credit crisis.
Britain’s second-largest bank is this week expected to reveal a pre-tax loss of at least £1 billion for the first six months of the year, with analysts warning it could slide to as much as £1.7 billion in the red.
The loss would be roughly five times higher than the deficit racked up by Barclays in 1992 at the height of the last recession.
RBS chairman Sir Tom McKillop is already under pressure from investors after the bank’s recent £12 billion rights issue. His chief executive, Sir Fred Goodwin, who marks 10 years at the bank this weekend, also faces shareholder scrutiny.
July 30 (Bloomberg) — With goodwill like Washington Mutual Inc.’s, it’s no wonder investors are getting such bad feelings about the company’s finances. Shares of the Seattle-based savings and loan have fallen 89 percent the past year to $4.43, leaving the company with a $7.6 billion stock-market value. The stock’s plunge must be a horrible mistake if we are to believe the values WaMu attributes to the assets on its balance sheet.
The International Monetary Fund says there’s no end in sight to the credit crisis gripping world financial markets.
As Australia’s NAB and ANZ have already discovered, the IMF believes banks are in for more pain as mortgage defaults soar and economies slow. The IMF has a particularly gloomy assessment of the US economy, and it came on the same day as the Bush administration revealed America’s budget deficit will climb to a record high of more than half-a-TRILLION dollars.
Speaker: Michael Rowland
Speakers: Jaime Caruana, head of the IMF’s capital markets division; Doug Peta, a market strategist with J and W Seligman; Jim Nussle, White House budget director Continue reading »
