America's Financial Crisis

[Armanen]

Re: America's Financial Crisis

That's not necessarily a wise maneuver either. Entirely isolating itself is not beneficial to Armenia. There needs to be trade, investment and flow of capital. That is the only way to grow.

However, that does not mean putting all your eggs in one basket. It means investing smart and making diversified decisions.

What does that have to do with my comment about buffet and gates wanting to protect their companies investments in turkey?

[Anonymouse]

Re: America's Financial Crisis

And he, along with bill gates, were against the passage of the Genocide bill last fall cause they said it would hurt u.s. investments in turkey, meaning their investments. SO fu*k him!

That's not necessarily a wise maneuver either. Entirely isolating itself is not beneficial to Armenia. There needs to be trade, investment and flow of capital. That is the only way to grow.

However, that does not mean putting all your eggs in one basket. It means investing smart and making diversified decisions.

[Armanen]

Re: America's Financial Crisis

And he, along with bill gates, were against the passage of the Genocide bill last fall cause they said it would hurt u.s. investments in turkey, meaning their investments. SO fu*k him!

[Anonymouse]

Re: America's Financial Crisis

He might be a "moron" but he is the world wealthiest "moron".
As we post ... the markets are going south even with the bailout.
Next week will be the revelation.

He's just a left-wing anti-capitalistic, limousine-liberal investor in love with the political machine which he has benefited greatly from and which has caused this crisis.

The fact that he has had the capital and the nose to smell when to shell shares of Freddie Mac (he sold it when he knew they were going to tank), doesn't make him any better.

[Armanen]

Re: America's Financial Crisis

Good! I don't want Armenia integreated with the world economy, so that it can be a slave to america and western europe. Look at the s*it they are in now, no thank you Armenia doesn't need that.

[Armenian]

Re: America's Financial Crisis

Untouched and Out of Touch: Armenia not affected by US crisis due to relative insignificance

The global financial crisis has no impact on Armenia and the country’s financial and economic stability won’t be serious affected, Armenia’s Central Bank says. However, this is not at all good news, since it shows that Armenia’s financial system is not integrated into the global network. “Our banks have no large concentrations in foreign markets, particular capital markets. They nearly have no purchased securities, so-called securitized packages, which were the main cause of the crisis on the international market. In this sense, our banks are free from such risks,” says Vahe Vardanyan, head of the Central Bank’s (CB) department for financial system policies and analyses. The financial crisis that hit the United States over the summer and into autumn caused the collapse of two mortgage agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The United States Government efforts to bail out these two agencies as well as help AIG Insurance Company stay afloat were not a basic solution to the problem. Assistance reached not all and one of the oldest American banks, currently the fourth largest bank in the US, Lehman Brothers, went broke, and became property of Great Britain’s Barclay’s for $1.75 billion.

Even efforts to provide assistance at the state level still proved too little to constrain the continuing shocks on the American, European and Asian stock markets. All this, however, is not reflected on the Armenian stock market in any way, since there are no signals warning of danger here, there is no company that would sell a security at international stock markets and suffer from fluctuating prices. The CB representative evaluates it as positive at least for this moment to have a closed financial system: “Not being integrated with international financial markets had a positive effect on us. An outflow of capital was registered in countries that have developed money markets. Since we don’t yet have such a developed market, there was no outflow of capital.” “But generally, the more financial markets are integrated, the more quickly the economy develops. That is, banks manage to bring larger sums from abroad, lower interests rates, etc,” Vardanyan says, adding that Armenian banking assets are very low – they make only 25 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Despite assurances for some international experts that the situation on financial markets will soon be settled, there are also opinions that the crisis is getting to a new start. Vardanyan finds it difficult to make assessments in this regard – as to what effect this new, possibly deeper crisis will have on Armenia: “A large number of private remittances are wired to Armenia from abroad, of which 85 percent come from Russia. However, at this moment the Russian market has no such problem and we don’t think that there can be a decline or essential reduction in the number of money transfers.” Therefore, Vardanyan says a slowdown of the growth of remittances from abroad has been observed in the latest period: “If I am not mistaken, the rate of growth has decreased a bit.” No slowdown in the growth of credit investments has been observed yet either. "We predict that the growth of crediting will continue till the end of the year. That is, at this moment we see no problem in reports that we receive from banks. Though, we, too, have heard that banks have become more cautious influenced by the problems coming from the international market,” the CB representative says, adding that the cautiousness of commercial banks is also conditioned by the high demand for loans in Armenia.

Commercial banks have no short-term fears of major impacts on Armenia’s financial market, but they find it possible that money will become more expensive in a longer term perspective. On September 29, speaking about the impact of the financial crisis, HSBC Armenia Bank CEO Tim Slater said that soon all banks in Armenia will raise the interest rates for loans and deposits. Slater told Mediamax news agency that recently the CB chairman met with heads of Armenia’s commercial banks and told them about the expected rise in interest rates: “The reason is that the CB is trying to preclude an inflation growth. The best means to achieve this goal is to raise the interest rate for refinancing and banks are to respond to CB signals.” CB representative Vardanyan says that in the future banks can have certain short-term problems in terms of attraction of means: “Even if some problems emerge with the attraction of sums, I don’t think there will be problems in terms of credit risk, which is the main risk of the banking system. Currently, we see no major risk deriving from international markets.”

Representatives of banks, however, continue to claim the opposite: VTB Armenia Bank Director Aleri Ovsyannikov said: “While formerly banks could attract deposits for five years and at a low rate of 12 percent, now the situation is changing. Now it is still possible to take money from international markets, but for a different price, funding is getting more expensive.” Considering the financial crisis, the All-Armenian Fund Hayastan is taking special steps for the charity telethon to be held in November. The Fund’s acting director Ara Vardanyan says that they realize that it is possible Armenian philanthropist from the United States and Europe will not be able this year to have as much participation as they always used to have. “Understanding that the US, Europe are a bit dangerous zones this year, we try to concentrate on the Armenians of Russia and on businesses operating in Armenia. In Armenia everything is normal.” “There are already arrangements with Mika Baghdasarov and VivaCell. There are also preliminary talks with various Armenian philanthropists from Russia and we are convinced that this year we will have serious donations from Russia. I am convinced that the sum collected this year will not be less than last year’s collection of $15 million,” Vardanyan says. The Fund’s acting director says that talks with large donors from the US, such as Louise Simone-Manoogian, Hrair Hovnanian and others have already begun: “It is a process that lasts long, two or three months, for that reason I cannot say whether they will participate or not.”

Source: http://www.armenianow.com/?action=vi...D=1203&lng=eng

[Azad]

Re: America's Financial Crisis

Buffet is a moron because part of the problem that caused this, he supported. And he insanely supports the bailout plan which just passed.

This bailout is socialism and it will further distort the economy and further spread this recession into other sectors.

He might be a "moron" but he is the world wealthiest "moron".
As we post ... the markets are going south even with the bailout.
Next week will be the revelation.

[Anonymouse]

Re: America's Financial Crisis

"This really is an economic Pearl Harbor," Buffett said. "That sounds melodramatic, but I've never used that phrase before. And this really is one."

"In my adult lifetime, I don't think I've ever seen people as fearful economically as they are now," the 78-year-old Buffett said.

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/081002/buffett_economy.html

Buffet is a moron because part of the problem that caused this, he supported. And he insanely supports the bailout plan which just passed.

This bailout is socialism and it will further distort the economy and further spread this recession into other sectors.

[Armenian]

Re: America's Financial Crisis

The U.S. Financial Crisis Is Spreading to Europe

Barely a week after Europeans rebuffed American pleas to join in their bailout of the banking system, Europe now faces a financial crisis almost as grave as that in the United States — demonstrating how swiftly this contagion is spreading around the world. In the last two days, governments from London to Berlin have seized or bailed out five faltering banks. In Ireland, where rumors of panicked withdrawals from banks spooked the stock market, the government has offered a two-year blanket guarantee on all deposits and bank debt. Asia has been less buffeted by the turmoil, though a brief run on a bank in Hong Kong last week brought back dark memories of June 1997, when speculation against the Thai currency sparked a financial crisis that fanned rapidly across Asia, and later to Brazil and Russia. Economists see a parallel between these two crises a decade apart: once creditors panic and begin to pull out their holdings, the underlying health of banks — or entire countries — no longer matters a great deal. In a global financial system, national borders are porous. “In this day and age, a bank run spreads around the world, not around the block,” said Thomas Mayer, the chief European economist at Deutsche Bank. “Once a bank run is under way, it doesn’t matter anymore if you have good loans or bad loans. People lose confidence in you.”

In a sign of how vulnerable Russia remains to contagion, officials halted trading on the Moscow stock exchange for two hours on Tuesday morning, fearing investor reaction to the House’s rejection of the Bush administration’s bailout plan. Trading resumed, and after President Bush vowed to win approval of the package, shares bounced back. “People ask, ‘What on earth is happening with Russia?’ ” said Roland Nash, chief analyst at Renaissance Bank in Moscow. “Russia is reacting to the unprecedented size, complexity and danger coming out of the U.S.” The shock waves could reverberate to the United States, experts said, since Russia has plowed its oil wealth into American debt, including Fannie Mae’s. Russia has additional problems, including unstable oil prices and a newly assertive foreign policy that is unpopular with many investors. The trigger for the loss of confidence in Europe, Mr. Mayer and other experts said, was the Treasury Department’s decision two weeks ago to let Lehman Brothers fail. That ricocheted through European markets, hurting banks and retail investors with exposure to Lehman.

It took a few days longer for Europeans to digest the implications of the collapse. But now that they have, they are turning a remorseless eye on other institutions they suspect of being vulnerable. As the White House scrambles to retool its rescue plan for the financial system, the global creep of the crisis has far-reaching implications, administration officials and outside experts said. It is likely to move Europeans to mount a more coordinated effort to shore up banks, a move that the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., pleaded for last week. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France is calling for a minisummit of leaders in Paris on Friday. “We all agree that the method by which everyone comes up with ad hoc solutions in his corner the moment a crisis starts in a financial company isn’t a systematic enough method,” said Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg, chairman of a group of European finance officials. On Tuesday, France and Belgium threw a $9 billion lifeline to Dexia, a Belgian-French lender — a day after Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg cobbled together $16.2 billion to rescue another bank, Fortis.

Europe’s woes could place additional burdens on an American plan, as more banks fall into distress. If the Treasury wins Congressional approval to buy mortgage-related securities from banks, how it prices those assets will affect the solvency of European institutions. Some of these banks suffer a form of guilt by association by being in the home lending business. Others, like Fortis, lack a strong base of deposits, which acts as a buffer against credit-related jitters. Countries that suffered housing bubbles — like Ireland, Britain and Spain — are especially vulnerable, as are several Eastern European countries and other emerging markets, which are running steep current account deficits and low foreign currency reserves. Ireland’s finance minister, Brian Lenihan, traced his country’s predicament back to Lehman Brothers, saying that the American authorities “were mistaken in permitting that bank to go to the wall because it has had very serious consequences for the world financial system.” The Irish plan guarantees bank deposits and debt for customers and creditors of six banks. That makes the government responsible for $400 billion, twice the country’s economic output.

Experts predict a rash of bank failures in Europe, though some say the process may prove less politically fraught than in the United States, given the tradition of nationalization there. So far, the hurdle to a broader plan has been the European Union’s legal and political restrictions that require burden-sharing and consensus. “The Europeans are more rigid and rule-based than the Americans,” said Simon Johnson, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. “But when things get bad enough, they’ll find the flexibility.” One red flag, he said, is UBS, the giant Swiss bank that is heavily exposed to mortgage-related securities and is headquartered in a small country that is not a member of the union. “Opinion is divided as to whether Switzerland could bail out UBS,” Mr. Johnson said. Beyond individual banks, the United States has to worry about the health of major holders of American government debt, from Russia and China to oil-producing states in the Middle East. Russia is a particular concern, experts said. With oil prices swooning and its own banks in crisis, it is coming under financial strain. If the Russians were to sell off their American debt holdings, it could depress the dollar and multiply the cost of a bailout.

Russia has already begun whittling its vast foreign reserves to finance an aid program for its banks. American officials said shifts in foreign holdings of American debt were not great. Other big creditors, like China, are in better shape financially, according to experts. But even there, growth is slowing, as trans-Pacific trade dries up. Should that contraction be traumatic and cause a banking crisis, it could lead the Chinese to sell their American holdings, these experts say. The dollar has also remained remarkably stable, given the turmoil on Wall Street and in Washington — another sign, economists said, that foreign investors have not yet lost faith in the United States. Partly, though, that reflects a paucity of other safe places to invest money. “We would run into a huge problem if foreigners lost confidence,” said Kenneth S. Rogoff, an economist at Harvard. “The rest of the world will give us several swings at the ball before they give up on us.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/01/bu...=worldbusiness

[Armenian]

Re: America's Financial Crisis

The overwhelming power and influence the US has had over the financial, political and socio-cultural aspects of this world in the post Second World War era is a bit difficult for an average humanbeing to realize, let alone understand. However, this decades long US set trend in politics, finance and culture is visibly changing. The US is no longer the undisputed leader of the so-called free world, nor it is the economic powerhouse it once was. Despite what some may want to believe, there is no turning back. It will take some time to hit bottom, but the US is definitely in its downward slide. The following news articles relate to the separation anxiety and growing pains the world is feeling in its attempt to finally create a true "multipolar" financial system as it gradually begins to move away from the US dominated global financial system.

Armenian

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Moscow Says U.S. Leadership Era Is Ending

Perhaps inevitably for a country often lectured by the United States about its own economy, Russia is using the occasion of the American financial crisis to do some lecturing of its own. President Dmitri A. Medvedev has blamed what he called financial “egoism” for the crisis and said it should be taken as a sign that America’s global economic leadership was drawing to a close. Along with some European leaders, Mr. Medvedev has called for greater multilateralism in financial regulation, echoing a Russian position on international relations generally. “The times when one economy and one country dominated are gone for good,” he said Thursday at St. Petersburg State University during the eighth annual Petersburger Dialog, a forum devoted to developing relations with Germany. After the American banking collapses, he said, the world does not want America as a “megaregulator.”

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, in Russia for the forum, said Germany, too, would “always support a multilateral approach” to market regulation. Along with the Germans and others, Russian leaders contend that poorly regulated American markets caused the current crisis. While it is hardly a new sentiment, in Russia there is a gloating quality, as the American crisis deepens. There has been a drumbeat of pronouncements in recent days on this theme. Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin made a speech about what he called American financial “irresponsibility” on Wednesday, blaming non-Russian causes for Russia’s stock plunge of more than 50 percent. Of the financial crisis, he said, “This is not the irresponsibility of some people but the irresponsibility of the system, which as it is known, claimed to be the leader.” In contrast to the Europeans who have also criticized lax American regulation, however, Russians are facing a financial system that has been in such chaos that regulators suspended trading on the stock market three times last month. The global credit crisis could trim about 1 percent from Russian growth next year, said the finance minister, Aleksei L. Kudrin.

As in other emerging markets, investors are pulling money out of Russia and depositing it in United States Treasury securities because they are considered the safest place to park money. By the time Mr. Medvedev spoke on Thursday, investors had pulled about $52 billion in net private capital out of Russia since the second week of August, when the war in Georgia and political tension with the West heightened concern about political risk here. The criticism of American finance coincided with a rise in Russian military bluster that has been viewed by some in the West as a resurgence of the Kremlin’s cold-war mentality. On Thursday, Russian generals announced plans for the largest air force exercise since the collapse of the Soviet Union, called Stability 2008, to be held next week. Also on Thursday, the deputy commander of Russia’s navy said the country would build eight new nuclear submarines before 2015.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/03/wo...russia.html?em

After Financial Crisis, Uncertainty and Lectures From Abroad

As America’s financial crisis was gathering speed, Brazil’s president seemed dismissive, almost gleeful, about the troubles up north. “What crisis?” said the president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, when asked last month about the financial maelstrom. “Go ask Bush about that.” Like a number of South American countries, Brazil had been flashing a newfound confidence, one born of a deliberate push to decrease political and economic reliance on the United States. But on Monday, shortly after Congress rejected a proposed $700 billion bailout package, Mr. da Silva struck a very different tone, saying in his weekly radio address that Brazil was not immune from the spreading woes after all. “A recessionary crisis in a country like the United States,” he explained to Brazilians, “can bring problems to all countries.” In only a few days, Latin American leaders have gone from schadenfreude to fear. Despite strong economic growth this decade and some aggressive efforts to break free of the American orbit, there is a growing nervousness that once again Latin America cannot escape the globalized connections in the financial sector that run through the United States. After seeming to revel in the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s president, skipped the opening of the United Nations General Assembly last week to visit China instead, saying that Beijing was now much more relevant than New York.

But by Tuesday, after the American stock market plunged nearly 778 points, dragging down Latin American exchanges with it, New York, and Wall Street in particular, had suddenly become relevant once more, with Mr. Chávez saying at a summit meeting in Brazil that the financial crisis would have the force of “one hundred hurricanes.” A number of governments in the region have been working for the past decade to reduce their dependence on the American economy. They have diversified trade with the rest of the world, while also making efforts to save tens, and sometimes hundreds, of billions of dollars for times when international conditions turn sour. As their economies strengthened and their political cooperation took off, it seemed the United States was being rapidly pushed out of the picture. Latin American leaders were standing up to America with growing bravado. In the past month, both Venezuela and Bolivia expelled the American ambassadors to their countries. Not only did Brazil, thought to be among America’s strongest allies in the region, support the expulsion by Bolivia, a major source of natural gas, but Mr. da Silva also railed against an American naval presence in the region, warning that his nation needed to put its own warships on alert in response.

Such anti-American sentiment reflects a longstanding bitterness over Washington’s economic prescriptions for Latin America, policies that some countries in the region blame for undercutting them. As Wall Street itself started to unravel, some leaders seemed to feel vindicated by the collapse. “We are witnessing the First World, which at one point had been painted as a mecca we should strive to reach, popping like a bubble,” Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Argentina’s president, said two weeks ago. But the financial crisis has exploded far beyond Wall Street. Whipsawing global markets are already having a ripple effect across Latin America. As nervous investors pulled money out of emerging markets, Brazil’s currency, the real, plunged 16 percent against the dollar last month, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in losses at large food and eucalyptus-pulp exporters that placed bad bets on the direction of the real. In Mexico, falling remittances from the United States are also raising concern, with Finance Minister Augustín Carstens warning that money sent home from across the border could decline by $2.8 billion, or 8 percent, this year. In Venezuela, a sharp drop in the value of the country’s bonds in the last two weeks reflects fears about plunging oil prices, especially since the United States remains by far the largest buyer of Venezuelan oil despite the deterioration of relations between the countries.

The issue, economists say, is largely about access to credit, which is needed to keep Latin America’s export-oriented economies humming along. “The credit crunch and the liquidity constraints we are seeing are going to affect everyone in the world,” said Alfredo Coutiño, a senior economist at Moody’s, the credit-rating agency. “That means that the cost for Latin American companies, particularly for those with the need for external funds, is going to be higher.” Plummeting commodity prices could also hamper growth in countries like Argentina and Ecuador, while the psychological effect of a crash in the United States is already reverberating through Latin American stock exchanges. That could lead to a reining in of household spending, which has driven much of the recent growth in Brazil’s economy, especially, economists said. Some governments are also directly tied to the American institutions they have derided, as in Venezuela, where the government has lost about $300 million in Lehman-related investments. Ricardo Sanguino, director of the finance committee in Venezuela’s National Assembly, said the losses were minor compared with the Central Bank’s reserves of more than $30 billion and previous decisions to shift some of those reserves into gold and out of American investment banks into Swiss banks. “The crisis affects us because we’re not a completely closed economy, but the impact won’t be disastrous,” Mr. Sanguino said.

With increased fiscal discipline, some countries have built up stabilization funds that should help them weather the fallout from the Wall Street mess, economists said. Brazil’s government has directed its national development bank, the BNDES, to extend $2.5 billion in credit to agricultural exporters for the next harvest to try to prevent a major slowdown. Other countries in the region may struggle more. Before the crisis, foreign investment had already dwindled in Bolivia and Ecuador, where governments flush with revenues before commodities prices began declining had nationalized foreign companies and clashed with multinationals. Argentina, still weighed down by debt, saved much less than Brazil or Chile during its economic expansion. Now it faces declining commodity prices, especially for soybeans, its main export, and will have less flexibility to infuse cash into its industries, analysts said. In recent weeks, the Argentine government, realizing it may face a fiscal shortfall, has been focused on international investors to gain new funds, and has leaned on Venezuela to refinance billions of dollars in debts. But with oil prices plummeting, Venezuela may impose harsher conditions on lending to Argentina. Even before the Wall Street meltdown, the region’s Achilles’ heel — high inflation — was rearing its head in several countries, notably in Venezuela, Bolivia and Argentina. Economists had been warning for months that Argentina could be headed toward a financial crisis of its own if it could not get rising inflation under control.

One silver lining for some countries could be China, which has become a strong export partner for South American soybeans, oil and other commodities. If China’s growth remains robust, the country will continue to lean on Brazil and Argentina for the crop. By traveling to China last month to sign a deal aimed at tripling oil exports to the country, Mr. Chávez may end up reducing his country’s dependence on the American market. “The world will never be the same after this crisis,” Mr. Chávez told reporters in Brazil. “A new world has to emerge, and it is a multipolar world. We are decoupling from the wagon of death.” Other leaders, like Mr. da Silva, have gone from being dismissive of the crisis to outright incensed at Wall Street and Washington for it. “We did what we were supposed to do to get our house in order,” an angry Mr. da Silva said Monday. “They spent years telling us what to do and they themselves didn’t do it.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/03/wo...l?ref=business