The Issue Is Especially Virulent in England
Eastern Europe might require funds from the International Monetary Fund and also other international lenders to preempt a banking crisis along with a shortage of credit in the region’s economies as western banks pare assets.
The IMF, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the entire world Bank and the European Investment Bank, which spent $42 billion as soon as the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holding Inc., should “stand ready to provide external assistance and financial support to banks,” the Vienna Initiative number of regulators and policy makers said in the statement from a meeting inside the Austrian capital on Jan. 16. The potential risk of “excessive and disorderly deleveraging in addition to a credit crunch” looms over the region, the trainer told us.
“There is a very strong impact out of this — a potentially strong impact,” EBRD’s Chief Economist Erik Berglof said in the interview within a Euromoney conference yesterday in Vienna. “You have the headquarters selection on assets which can be small when you go through the total balance sheet, but when you look at the subsidiaries in eastern Europe they’re systemic in the countries where they operate.”
Regulators and policy makers are trying to shield economic development in eastern Europe against contagion in the euro area’s deepening debt crisis. New capital and liquidity requirements for the western lenders controlling three-quarters of eastern Europe’s banking system threaten to curb credit had to fund the region’s companies and households.’Especially Virulent’
Deleveraging by western European banks could make credit in eastern Europe scarcer, the World Bank’s Andrew Burns was quoted as saying in Austrian newspaper Wiener Zeitung today.
“The issue is especially virulent in eastern Europe and central Asia because those countries strongly be determined by loans from developed countries,” Burns said.
A revival with the Vienna Initiative is necessary since there must be a recognition that “there remains a coordination failure” between eastern and western Europe to tackle banking risks, Piroska Nagy, director of country strategy and policy at the EBRD, said on the Vienna conference.
The IMF, EIB, EBRD as well as the World Bank “will engage with a heightened level with all the region,” Nagy said today in the interview, without elaborating further.