Concern for nations outside magic circle
By Krishna Guha and Alan Beattie in Washington
Published: October 30 2008 23:25 | Last updated: October 30 2008 23:25
Moves by the Federal Reserve and International Monetary Fund to make dollars available quickly and without conditions to a select group of emerging markets raise questions about the impact on those left out of the schemes.
The initial response was very positive, with a broad-based rally across emerging market stocks and bonds, as investors took the view that more support for emerging markets in general was good for all of them.
But there were some signs of differentiation in the currency market between those that now have access to Fed dollars – Brazil, Mexico, South Korea and Singapore – and those that do not.
Meanwhile, experts expressed lingering concerns that by throwing a protective cordon around some emerging economies, the Fed and the IMF could aggravate the challenges facing those outside the new magic circle.
“If you create a class of emerging markets that are really protected and close to the developed countries there is a danger that the second-class citizens are marked out more clearly,” says Simon Johnson, a former chief economist at the IMF.
Raghu Rajan, another former IMF chief economist, says there is now a division between “those inside the club and those outside the club” – although he believes the negative effects on those excluded will be limited.
The hazard that helping some countries might hurt others is an international variant of the problem created when governments rushed to rescue their banks, fuelling pressure on non-bank financial institutions.
Policymakers call it the “boundary problem” and it is a recurring dilemma as authorities around the world ramp up their efforts to curb the credit crisis.
The Fed and the Fund are creating two protective walls to shield emerging markets in need of dollars. Within the inner wall are the four nations that are receiving $30bn (€23bn, £18bn) each from the Fed.
The Fed says they are “systemically important” and “well-managed”. They resemble the core banks at the centre of bank rescue plans. Within the outer wall are the emerging markets eligible for large rapid loans from the IMF under its new no-strings-attached lending programme.
The IMF has not named countries eligible for these loans, but the list would include the four backed by the Fed, the Czech Republic, Chile plus possibly Poland and some Asian nations. Other emerging markets will still be eligible for IMF bail-outs, but on an ad hoc basis.
The enhanced differentiation between markets changes their relative riskiness. The question is whether it could even make some outside the boundaries more vulnerable than before.
This is what happened to non-banks excluded from bank rescue plans. Auto finance companies and insurance firms are now asking to be treated like banks, even if they have to become banks in the process.
There are differences. The new international lines of defence resemble a set of concentric circles rather than the binary division between banks and non-banks.
No nation is explicitly excluded from aid and the $120bn from the Fed means there is now more money available overall.
Moreover, nations do not compete with each other in the way that banks and insurance companies do. There is a “public good” in the form of system stability.
Still, concerns remain. Exclusion from the new facilities may be seen as signalling unsustainable policies, or a lack of international support.
With almost $50bn committed to bail-outs, and $100bn notionally set aside for new no-strings loans, the IMF will have only $100bn left for all other cases.
Moreover, emerging economies compete for private capital. Changes in relative standing can lead to portfolio shifts that could result in some countries losing in absolute terms – just as the bank rescue pushed up the cost of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac debt.
Michael Hugman, a strategist at Standard Bank, says: “There is always a danger, particularly in the current market environment, that any intervention ... will have negative effects on those countries excluded from the new facility.”
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European funding for UK business ‘too little, too late’
By Jonathan Moules, Enterprise Correspondent
Published: October 30 2008 22:58 | Last updated: October 30 2008 22:58
The European Investment Bank funding announced on Thursday will be too little too late for many UK businesses that are struggling for cash in the face of customers tightening their payment terms and high street lenders withdrawing facilities.
The Federation of Small Businesses welcomed Thursday’s announcement as a step in the right direction. However, Andrew Cave, FSB spokesman, said the problem was that the money was unlikely to be available to the companies that need it for at least five months.
This would be too late for Mark Olbrich, director of Salade, an upmarket sandwich shop chain, which opened five stores before its bank pulled vital creditfacilities.
Mr Olbrich’s problem is that he needs at least six stores to break even and he has run out of cash from his own resources. “It is touch and go right now,” he said.
Sally Preston, founder of frozen babyfood producer Babylicious, said her business has kept its head above water in part by shaving expenditure on items, such as insurance.
“Everybody needs liquidity because payment terms are being slashed everywhere,” she said, adding that many of the businesses she knows are on the verge of going under because they cannot get credit.
“Banks want more and more personal security for loans, which at a time when your house is going down in value is difficult to do.”
She holds out little hope of renewing her overdraft facility after hearing of another business with a £1m contract with Tesco that was refused an overdraft by its bank.
However, Andrew Carruthers, chief executive of Spark Ventures, an early-stage venture capital investor, said provision of additional funding support for loans missed the point – the main problem for many small businesses now was falling sales due to the economic downturn.
“It actually may have started in the banking sector, but it has gone past that point,” he said. “A lot of small businesses are saying that contracts they expected to raise this month have either been pulled or delayed. It is now for the banks to assess whether they are good risks or not.”
The Forum of Private Business, which represents 25,000 small and medium-sized enterprises, has seen increasing numbers of members call with stories of increased overdraft rates and withdrawn credit lines.
“There can be no excuse for the major lenders not to live up to their responsibilities to small businesses,” said Nick Palin, the FPB’s director of finance.
Kevin Whiting, who runs Sherdon Estate Agents, near Basingstoke, has banked with HSBC for 17 years. However, his application to increase his small mortgage in order to develop the site, which he estimates will bring in an additional £600 each month, was rejected.
“Small businesses like mine are being seriously hit by these economic conditions,” he said. “Over the past eight weeks or so banking issues have compounded an already difficult situation. I suffered bad experiences during the previous recession and, unless the banks free up funding, it will ultimately be the employees of small firms who suffer.”
John Wright, the national chairman of the Federation of Small Businesses, said: “The government must insist more banks apply to the EIB so more small businesses can access the much-needed funds. More than 80 per cent of small businesses use the four major banks, yet only one – Barclays – currently supplies EIB finance. We need to be assured that this money will actually filter down to small businesses.”
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The Short View: Trick or treat?
By John Authers
Published: October 31 2008 02:00 | Last updated: October 31 2008 02:00
Kids dressing up for Hallowe'en tonight could do worse than go dressed as a stock market trader. It is the anniversary of the day when world market indices touched their all-time high.
The FTSE World index is down 44 per cent since the rally in stocks finally turned into a pumpkin (in dollar terms - yen-based investors are sitting on a fall of 52 per cent while lucky UK investors have seen a decline of only 28 per cent, according to Bloomberg data).
The fall was universal. Treats go to investors who targeted the stock markets of Tunisia and Lebanon a year ago, which are the only ones to have risen - by 9.5 and 6 per cent respectively - in the past year. Even they are down in yen.
Tricks go to everyone else. The worst performers were the smaller European emerging markets, led by Iceland with a decline of 95 per cent.
At least investors who buy now can do so more cheaply. Several noted bears have said that stocks look slightly cheap compared with historical trends. They are buying, but slowly, as stock valuations tend to overshoot and become far too cheap before markets stage a lasting rebound.
There are other reasons to believe in a Hallowe'en respite this year. Money is piling up in money market funds and T-bills, suggesting there is a pile of cash waiting to enter stocks. Many institutions have less than their target asset allocation invested in stocks and have to sell bonds and buy stocks. And indices have fallen so far that they can rebound more without breaking the stubborn downward trend that started last Hallowe'en. The US election will remove some uncertainty.
None of this implies, alas, that the evil spirits afflicting equities have been permanently rebuffed. That must await the end of the wave of forced sales and evidence of the extent of the damage to the global economy and corporate profits.
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Lack of export credit threatens Latin America
By Mark Mulligan in Madrid
Published: October 30 2008 23:31 | Last updated: October 30 2008 23:31
A shortage of export credit threatens to accelerate the downturn in Latin America, which is already suffering the impact of softening commodity prices, according to a former head of the regional development bank.
Enrique Iglesias, head of the Iberoamerican Summit Secretariat in Madrid and a former chief of the Inter-American Development Bank, said the region’s dependence on foreign capital had made it particularly vulnerable to current financial turbulence.
“In the last few years, medium-sized and large companies in Latin America have been funding themselves in New York. They issue bonds, arrange loans . . . so the credit crunch is hitting the region hard. One aspect of this is that there is a shortage of export credits. For a region that relies so heavily on exports, this is a serious problem.”
On Wednesday, the US Federal Reserve lent $30bn (€23bn, £19bn) each to Brazil and Mexico through currency swaps in an attempt to ease the shortage of dollars in the region’s biggest economies.
Although in better condition than in previous years to withstand the current crisis, many countries now faced a sharp downturn in growth rates, said Mr Iglesias. Softening commodity prices had hit state revenues, while falling stock markets and currencies reflected declining investor confidence. Remittances, an important component of income in countries such as Mexico and Ecuador, were also falling rapidly.
The most vulnerable countries were oil exporters such as Venezuela and Ecuador. Argentina and Brazil, which are big agricultural exporters, would also suffer “Argentina, for example, will lose about $3bn this year in tax revenues simply because of the fall in the price of soya beans,” he said.
The World Bank recently slashed its 2009 growth forecasts for Latin America from between 4.2 and 4.6 per cent to 2.5 to 3.5 per cent. The bank, through its International Finance Corporation, recently responded to exporters’ demands by lifting the amount of guarantees in its trade finance programme by $500m, to $1.5bn.
The financial crisis would be the dominant theme of the Iberoamerican summit which began on Thursday in El Salvador, said Mr Iglesias.
Despite the gloom, he added: “We have $460bn in reserves. Although inflation has gone up recently, it is still under control.
“Debt has been reduced considerably and is completely manageable. The fiscal situation is solid.”
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US closes Syria embassy for a day
By Anna Fifield in Beirut
Published: October 30 2008 08:36 | Last updated: October 30 2008 08:36
The US on Thursday closed its embassy in Syria for a day, amid increased
tensions between Washington and Damascus after a US military attack
killed a Syrian who was allegedly sending foreign fighters into Iraq.
An anti-US demonstration is due to be held in Damascus to protest against Sunday’s US night raid on Bou Kamal, a Syrian village that is a main transit point into Iraq.
The attack killed eight people including Abu Ghadiyah, who was alleged to have been supporting the insurgency in Iraq. Damascus has denied that the man was involved in terrorism.
”Due to increased security concerns, the US Embassy will be closed on Thursday, October 30, 2008,” the embassy said in a statement on Wednesday night. It had previously advised Americans in Syria of an increased threat of terrorist attacks, emonstrations and other violent actions
against them.
The US recalled its ambassador to Syria following the assassination in 2005
of Rafiq Hariri, former Lebanese prime minister, in which Syria was accused
of involvement.
Sunday’s military action – the first such raid inside Syrian territory, and one that echoes recent US attacks on Taliban fighters inside Pakistan – has sparked an angry response from Damascus.
The Syrian government had ordered an American school and cultural centre in
Damascus to close, and it had asked the United Nations Security
Council to act to prevent another such attack.
Bashar Ja’afari, the Syrian ambassador to the UN, called the raid a”flagrant act of aggression”.
Analysts say Sunday’s attack was a reminder that relations between Washington and Damascus remain strained.
”Syria’s indirect talks with Israel and its diplomatic developments with Lebanon had eclipsed the whole reason why the US had problems with Syria,”
said Andrew Tabler, a US expert on Syria. “It goes back to the whole issue
of foreign fighters in Iraq. This issue is the major bone of contention
between the two countries and this raid shows it will continue to be.”
The US has repeatedly accused Syria of failing to do enough to stop
militants, including al-Qaeda insurgents, from crossing into Iraq, and has
been sceptical of Damascus’ claims that it is more closely policing the
border.
Syria is on Washington’s list of countries that support terrorism and has
been under US sanctions since 2004, because of its alleged support for
militant groups such as Lebanon’s Hizbollah.
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Shell pulls back from oil sands investment
By Ed Crooks and Maggie Urry in London
Published: October 30 2008 08:33 | Last updated: October 30 2008 22:41
Royal Dutch Shell has delayed a planned investment in Canada’s oil sands, in the latest sign of companies adjusting their plans to reflect the global economic downturn and the fall in the price of oil.
Shell had planned to make a decision next year on the second phase of the expansion of its Athabasca oil sands project, but Jeroen van der Veer, the chief executive, said the company would “wait for costs to cool down . . . before any new investment decision is made”.
Mr van der Veer was speaking as Shell reported a 31 per cent rise in underlying net income to $8.04bn. The result was ahead of expectations but less buoyant than those of its rivals BP and ExxonMobil.
Shell is one of the western oil companies most strongly committed to “unconventional” resources such as the oil sands, and has set a target of deriving 15 per cent of its production from those sources by 2015.
Projects in the oil sands of Alberta, which have been fiercely criticised by environmentalists, are among the world’s highest-cost oil developments.
In recent weeks, several companies operating there, including Suncor, Petro-Canada, Nexen and Opti Canada, have delayed investment plans.
Construction of the first phase of Shell’s Athabasca expansion is already under way, and will go ahead as planned, adding 100,000 barrels per day of additional capacity, of which Shell has 60 per cent.
Phase two is intended to add a further 100,000 barrels per day.
Shell announced on Wednesday that Peter Voser, chief financial officer,would take over from Mr van der Veer on July 1 next year.
The results gave a sense of the challenge he will face in delivering growth at a turbulent time for the world economy, financial markets and the oil price.
Shell’s oil and gas production fell by 6.6 per cent in the quarter, mostly caused by hurricanes in the US and planned maintenance in the North Sea.
Mr Voser said Shell stuck by its “long-term aspiration” that in the next decade production would grow by 2-3 per cent a year as a result of Shell’s investment in long-lived projects such as the oil sands.
Mr van der Veer called the results, which benefited from the sharp rise in the oil price, “satisfactory”.
The group was “watching the world economic situation closely” but was “robust across a wide range of energy prices”, he added.
Shell promised “competitive and progressive dividends”, echoing BP’s recognition on Tuesday that investors are concerned about the income from their shares.
Shell declared a third-quarter dividend of 40 cents a share, a rise of 11 per cent over the same quarter last year.
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Caution grows after run on Kuwait bank
By Andrew England in Abu Dhabi
Published: October 30 2008 19:14 | Last updated: October 30 2008 19:14
The outlook for Kuwait’s banking system is shifting towards negative for the first time in a decade, Moody’s rating agency said on Thursday – a sign likely to heighten concerns about potential weaknesses in the nation’s financial services.
The Moody’s report comes days after a run on Gulf Bank, Kuwait’s second-largest commercial bank, following revelations that it had incurred significant losses as a result of derivatives trading. Although modest, it was the first bank run in the Middle East since the global financial crisis erupted.
Analysts say most banks in the oil-rich Arab Gulf are well-capitalised and that the region is better positioned than most to navigate the storm. There is also a belief that governments would be likely to bail out troubled institutions rather than lose face or create panic. But the disclosures about Gulf Bank shocked many, and highlighted the growing impact of the turmoil on the region.
Standard & Poor’s said it had revised its outlooks on six Gulf banks from positive to stable, a further sign that analysts are becoming more cautious about the prospects of the region’s financial sector. The banks included Kuwait Finance House, an Islamic bank that is Kuwait’s second-largest financial institution, and two Dubai banks that merged last year to create Emirates NBD – the United Arab Emirates’ largest bank.
“The impact of the global market turmoil, plunging oil prices, falling stock markets and the liquidity dry-up is creating fresh challenges for . . . [Gulf] banks in terms of business growth, profitability, asset quality and liquidity,” said Standard & Poor’s.
Moody’s said Gulf Bank’s losses cast doubts on control and risk management practices, “particularly in relation to banks’ capacity to identify and manage risks”.
After suspending Gulf Bank’s shares on Sunday, the government moved to guarantee all bank deposits. A week earlier it had insisted all was well in the financial system and no such protection was required.
Gulf Bank has not revealed the size of its losses, but some estimates put them at $800m (€622m, £493m). Moody’s called Kuwait’s financial sector “stable to negative” and said banks’ operating environment remained strong. But it was concerned about banks’ large exposure to real estate, with lending to the sector growing by 52 per cent in 2007 and reaching 25 per cent of total loans, while exposure to construction accounted for almost 7 per cent of loans.
Property prices in the Gulf have soared in recent years, and fears of corrections have been mounting.
Moody’s said a large slice of conventional banks’ retail credit portfolios comprised lending to finance share purchases. The Kuwait stock market – like others in the region – has suffered sharp declines recently, sparking protests by investors and raising concerns about some of the country’s smaller investment companies.
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Kidnap alleged in China dispute
By Mure Dickie in Beijing
Published: October 30 2008 23:57 | Last updated: October 30 2008 23:57
A British scrap metal company has accused Chinese customers of abducting its chief trader for ransom in a case that underlines the challenges of doing business in China.
Goldarrow Metals alleged that Anil Srivastav was seized from a Shanghai airport this month and held for days in a small hotel in the eastern port city of Ningbo.
The company said it was forced to send shipping documents worth $350,000 to Ningbo Yibao Import and Export, a customer, to secure Mr Srivastav’s release after local police and British consular officials refused to intervene.
The affair comes amid mounting friction in the international scrap metal trade caused by a slump in commodity prices. Tens of thousands of tonnes of imported copper and aluminium scrap are reported to be sitting in Chinese ports after local companies defaulted on deals.
Goldarrow said Mr Srivastav went to Ningbo this month to seek $1.2m in due payments from Ningbo Yibao and associate companies. It alleged that James Xu, a Ningbo Yibao trader, instead told him he would not be allowed to leave the city until Goldarrow paid compensation for quality problems with a previously delivered scrap shipment.
When Mr Srivastav slipped away to a Shanghai airport to return to the UK, he said, he was dragged from the terminal by a group of men and bundled into a people carrier. “I was shouting, ‘Help! Help! Help!” he said. “I was totally terrified...one guy pointed his finger like a gun and put it to my temple.”
Mr Xu denied any involvement in holding Mr Srivastav against his will and said his only role in the case had been as a friend of the boss of another company, Ningbo Guanghe Metal Recycling, known as Guanghe. Ningbo Yibao said it had no knowledge of the transaction.
However, Mr Xu, when contacted by telephone, acknowledged that Ningbo Yibao had received the $350,000 in shipping documents sent by Goldarrow ahead of Mr Srivastav’s return to the UK. The documents had been transferred subsequently to Guanghe, Mr Xu said.
Goldarrow said it was forced to send the receipts to Ningbo Yibao – allowing it to redeem $350,000 of cargo from Chinese ports – to secure Mr Srivastav’s release.
The head of Guanghe, who gave his name only as Meng, said representatives of the company found Mr Srivastav at a Shanghai airport early on October 17 and had asked him to return.
Mr Meng said Mr Srivastav had then been taken to a police station because Guanghe believed he was guilty of fraud. He denied holding him against his will.
After the dispute was resolved, Guanghe staff had merely accompanied him to Mr Xu’s wedding and to places of entertainment before sending him off with gifts on October 21. “We didn’t kidnap him,” Mr Meng said.
Mr Srivastav said he was taken to a Ningbo police station where he appealed for protection but was returned to Guanghe staff. “I said, ‘Please put me in jail’, but they said, ‘We can’t put you in jail because you haven’t committed any crime’.”
The embassy in Beijing said it did not become involved after concluding it was a business dispute. Ningbo city police confirmed they had been involved in a case involving Guanghe and a foreigner but declined to give further details by telephone.
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Mining groups face cuts to iron ore prices
By Javier Blas in London and Patti Waldmeir in Shanghai
Published: October 31 2008 02:00 | Last updated: October 31 2008 02:00
Iron ore miners face the prospect of the first price cut in seven years as steel production in China and elsewhere plunges amid the global downturn.
After an informal meeting last week at a conference in the Chinese city of Quingdao, traders and bankers said a cut of 10-20 per cent was a likely outcome of the formal negotiations, due to begin in November, for annual contracts.
However, these people warned that chaotic global economic conditions made any forecast tentative.
After this year's record 85 per cent jump in iron ore prices, a price reduction would damp the cost of cars, machinery and construction materials, contributing to lower inflationary pressures as central banks slash rates.
Bankers said a price cut would make only a small dent in miners' revenues as ore prices have jumped more than 300 per cent in the past five years.
Any cut would be the first reduction since iron ore prices fell 2.4 per cent in 2002, when the global economy slowed in the wake of the dotcom bubble.
The first formal contacts of the secretive - and often acrimonious - annual negotiations will take place between Chinese steel millers led by Baosteel and miners Vale of Brazil, Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton.
Chinese steelmakers appear to be pressing for a quick agreement, taking advantage of today's soft demand and low prices in the spot market.
But mining executives said they were in no rush to settle until the second quarter of next year, betting that demand will have recovered by then, helping them to avoid a price cut.
Iron ore spot prices in China have fallen to less than $70 a tonne, down from an all-time high of close to $200 a tonne earlier this year.
The spot price was currently below the estimated cost of Australia's annual ore contracts, including freight costs, of about $90 a tonne, said traders.
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Wall Street ‘made rod for own back’
By Francesco Guerrera, Nicole Bullock and Julie MacIntosh in New York
Published: October 30 2008 23:34 | Last updated: October 30 2008 23:34
Wall Street unwittingly created one of the catalysts for the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and American International Group by backing new bankruptcy rules that were aimed at insulating banks from the failure of a big client, lawyers and bankers say.
The 2005 changes made clear that certain derivatives and financial transactions were exempt from provisions in the bankruptcy code that freeze a failed company’s assets until a court decides how to apportion them among creditors.
The new rules were intended to insulate financial companies from the collapse of a large counterparty, such as a hedge fund, by making it easier for them to unwind trades and retrieve collateral.
However, experts say the new rules might have accelerated the demise of Bear, Lehman and AIG by removing legal obstacles for banks and hedge funds that wanted to close positions and demand extra collateral from the three companies.
“The changes were introduced to promote the orderly unwinding of transactions but they ended up speeding up the bankruptcy process,” said William Goldman, a partner at DLA Piper, the law firm. “They wanted to protect the likes of Lehman and Bear Stearns from the domino effect that would have ensued had a counterparty gone under. They never thought the ones to go under would have been Lehman and Bear.”
The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, the trade body that lobbied for the changes, rejected the criticism, saying the 2005 rules “enhance legal certainty for contracts, [and] reduce legal risk ... and systemic risk”.
The International Swaps and Derivatives Association added that the 2005 clarifications “provided legal certainty by clarifying existing federal policy”.
The changes in the code expanded the scope and definition of financial transactions not covered by bankruptcy rules to include credit default swaps and mortgage repurchase agreements – products used widely by Lehman, Bear and AIG.
Lawyers said under the old rules, creditors of companies facing financial difficulties were wary of settling trades or seeking extra collateral because they knew such demands could precipitate a bankruptcy filing and potentially freeze their claims.
However, when the financial health of Bear, Lehman and AIG took a sharp turn for the worse this year, their trading counterparties – mainly hedge funds and other banks – were not deterred from seeking to settle their trades or forcing the three companies to put up more collateral.
Such pressure exacerbated the liquidity squeeze that ultimately forced the three companies to hoist the white flag. Bear was sold to JPMorgan in a cut-price deal in March, while Lehman filed for bankruptcy last month and AIG was rescued by a $120bn government loan.
Lawyers said the 2005 exemptions also could apply to non-financial companies, potentially complicating the bankruptcy process of any company that uses derivatives. Stephen Lubben, professor at Seton Hall University School of Law, said: “These provisions affect a non-financial firm, such as a car company or an airline, because they also engage in derivatives trading.”
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Nintendo says gamers still spending
By Robin Harding in Tokyo
Published: October 30 2008 12:39 | Last updated: October 30 2008 12:39
Consumers are continuing to buy video games despite the financial crisis, Nintendo said on Thursday, but the world’s largest maker of game consoles still cut its earnings forecast as the strong yen eats into the profits of Japanese exporters.
Nintendo, which leads rivals Sony and Microsoft in the sale of this generation of video game machines, said that even in the last few weeks as the world realised the severity of the economic downturn, sales remained strong. It reported first-half operating profits of Y252bn ($2.6bn), up 34 per cent on last year, and raised its sales forecast for the Wii console by 1m to 27.5m units. It cut this year’s net income forecast by 16 per cent to Y345bn, however.
Nintendo’s resilience supports the theory that consumers will turn to cheap, stay-at-home entertainment such as video games in a weak economy, but it also shows that even Japan’s most successful exporters are suffering from the yen’s strength.
The success of the DS handheld console and Wii home console has turned Nintendo into Japan’s biggest electronics company by market value. Both hit products are based on innovative user interfaces: DS games are controlled with a touch screen, while the Wii controller can measure physical movements by the player.
Most of Japan’s big consumer electronics companies have now reported and Nintendo’s strong results confirmed some of the first half trends. While Sony gave a disastrous profits warning last week, its PlayStation division enjoyed sales which beat the expectations of many analysts.
Kazuo Hirai, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment, recently told the Financial Times that because games were an affordable pleasure, they would be less affected than other industries by the slowdown.
The picture in the televisions sector is more mixed. Sharp on Thursday reported that first half operating profits were down 36 per cent to Y50.8bn, in part because of the falling price of liquid crystal panels used to make TVs. Pioneer, another TV maker, said on Thursday that it suffered an operating loss of Y13bn in the six months. Sony had earlier cut its forecast for TV sales this year by 1m to 16m units.
TV sales are still strongly up on last year, however, as consumers upgrade to digital flat panel screens before analogue broadcasts are switched off around the world. Panasonic has expressed quiet confidence about Christmas sales and Toshiba’s TV business is back in the black.
Gadgets that do not entertain depressed consumers, however, are suffering. Every manufacturer of compact digital cameras – which have some of the highest margins in the industry – has reported weak sales and sales of mobile phones have been terrible in Japan, where the market has slumped because of cuts to handset subsidies.
In terms of profitability, the companies that have done best are those such as Panasonic, which have done the most to restructure, cut costs, and move production abroad, and Sony, which is expected to make deep cuts.
“The consumer electronics sector has entered a stage where a shift to a restructuring strategy from an expansion strategy is needed,” analysts at Citigroup wrote in a research report.
The other issue that dominates the sector is exchange rates. Both Sony and Nintendo are assuming that the yen will fall back to Y140 to the euro for the rest of the year, compared to Y128 today, but if the yen remains strong Japan’s consumer electronics makers will face an ever-growing threat from cheaper rivals in Taiwan and Korea.
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Crisis-hit Russia must scale down its ambition
By Robert Skidelsky
Published: October 31 2008 02:00 | Last updated: October 31 2008 02:00
The official view is that Russia is an outstandingly successful economy temporarily derailed by a financial shock of foreign origin. Its annual economic growth in real terms averaged 7 per cent in the years during which Vladimir Putin was president (2000-08), annual real wages rose by almost 15 per cent, the federal budget was continually in surplus. Mr Putin, now prime minister, was quick to blame America for the downturn. Before the crisis hit home Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's president, boasted in June that Russia was not part of the problem but part of the solution. Its cash-rich companies would invest abroad, Moscow would become a world financial centre, the rouble would become a reserve currency and so on.
All this turned out to be fantasy. The Russian stock market has lost 70 per cent of its value this year. The commodity prices that spearheaded its boom are now falling. The easy credit money from the west that fuelled it has now fled. Russia has failed to diversify its economy and its politics have long made investors nervous. A confrontation with reality is long overdue.
Metals, energy, and food account for 80 per cent of Russian exports. The growth of the economy in the Putin years was largely driven by the devaluation of the rouble in 1998-99 and the increase in the prices of these products: between 2000 and 2007 real prices of metals went up by 275 per cent, of energy by 210 per cent, and of food by 160 per cent. However, it is now clear that the commodity boom peaked in June-July 2008 and is in sharp re-verse. Since July, the commodity price index has dropped by more than 20 per cent.
This fall has a twofold significance. First, Russia's consumer economy has been built on the commodity economy. The great oligarchic fortunes are in oil and metals. Although domestic consumption has contributed significantly to growth in recent years, diversification away from commodities has barely started since the high price of oil strengthened the exchange rate and sucked imports into the retail sector, and oil revenues made it easier to posture as a great power. The downturn in the commodity economy will thus have a multiplied effect on the consumer economy and the Russian standard of living. Second, the government's spending plans are based on a $70 a barrel oil price. Every one-dollar decrease in the barrel price implies $3bn less in export revenues a year. It is currently at $65, having fallen from $140 in June.
Attention has focused on the slide in Russia's dollar-denominated benchmark RTS index. More important is over-leveraging by a few huge companies. Russia's banking system has been a poor channeller of commodity wealth into non-energy businesses. There are too many banks; most are undercapitalised. Growth in the non-energy sectors has been fuelled by collateralised loans from western banks. Russian banks and companies have about $450bn (€362bn, £292bn) of foreign debt, $50bn of which must be repaid or refinanced by the year end. So Russian businesses are exposed to the troubled European banking system when the value of the shares they put up as collateral may have fallen below the cost of the loans, and Russian inter-bank lending is frozen by a crisis of confidence. The economist Sergei Guriev argues that the fall in commodity prices and the credit crunch have cut Russia's annual growth potential by 2 per cent.
Despite the professionalism of the rescue mounted by the finance ministry and central bank - and the budgetary cushion provided by the stabilisation fund, brainchild of Andrei Illarionov, Mr Putin's discarded economic adviser - Russia carries a heavy burden of political risk. This is the real economic legacy of the Putin years. Mr Putin does not understand the need for a degree of consistency between economic and foreign policy: or rather the reconciliation he has sought has been based on Russia's energy windfall. If this has now ended, as seems likely, the key assumption of his politics - that Russia can use its energy power to boost its world power without paying much attention to the sensitivities of anyone but the Russian electorate - has been destroyed.
Russia needs to scale down its geopolitical ambition to its real weight - that of an emerging economy with only 3 per cent of the world's gross domestic product and a quarter of America's living standard. Also, it desperately needs to develop its human capital. The Putin era is over but Medvedev's has not begun. This is the real Russian crisis.
The writer is emeritus professor of political economy at Warwick university, contributes a fortnightly column to Vedomosti and is an independent crossbench peer in the House of Lords
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Mittal fatigue
By Peter Marsh
Published: October 31 2008 02:00 | Last updated: October 31 2008 02:00
Lakshmi Mittal next week faces the biggest test of his career. The Indian metals magnate will try to convince investors that his vision of the steel industry still has merit, in spite of the battering the sector has received amid the global financial crisis.
When he presents the third-quarter results of ArcelorMittal on Wednesday, speaking to analysts and investors in telephone conversations from his company's imposing headquarters in the centre of Luxembourg, Mr Mittal will do his best to put a brave face on a 72 per cent decline in the share price of the world's biggest steelmaker over the past four months.
Slides in the market value of most large steel businesses have exceeded the falls incurred at many of the industrial companies that are their biggest customers. Since late June, steel shares have underperformed the Datastream composite index of all quoted companies worldwide by 52 per cent.
Investors have suddenly become frightened that they had pushed up steel company valuations far too much in the previous five years - a stellar time during which Mr Mittal made a series of dramatic acquisitions and emerged as easily the biggest influence on the sector.
In his response to the setbacks, Mr Mittal is expected to outline new production cuts on top of those ArcelorMittal has made in the past month. He is also thought likely to announce some trimming of its ambitious $35bn (£21bn, €27bn) expansion plan over the next eight years, while also pointing to growth opportunities for the industry even in the midst of the current gloom.
But what of the broader outlook? Michael Shillaker, analyst at Credit Suisse, says: "There is an almost complete lack of visibility about steel companies' likely earnings over the next year . . . It's as though the industry has fallen into a black hole." The chief executive of a large US steelmaker says the stream of negative economic and financial news in September and October has hit the industry "like a bomb".
Fears about an economic slowdown in China, which has sustained the steel industry during the boom years, plus a sudden reduction in world steel demand in September from sectors such as construction and vehicles, were also behind the rapid build-up in negative investor sentiment. That came after a year or so in which the steel business weathered fairly well the perturbations affecting other sectors, largely due to signs that demand for steel from emerging regions had been holding up.
Inevitably, one of the biggest losers from the change in sentiment of recent weeks has been Mr Mittal himself. Since the chairman and chief executive of ArcelorMittal also owns 45 per cent of its stock, the value of his personal shareholding has fallen since late June from $66bn to $16bn.
The changed perceptions about the steel business come after several years in which its image as one of the world's worst performing industries - which it had for three decades until about 2001 - appeared to be on the point of being jettisoned for good. Until then almost no one, with Mr Mittal being a big exception, believed the steel business was capable of making returns on a par with other globally spread sectors such as chemicals or engineering.
But then began a series of big mergers in the steel industry - led by Mr Mittal - that gave steel companies the market power to push through price increases. Sustained demand for steel from an expanding world economy, helped by a surge in consumption from China, which now both produces and uses almost 40 per cent of the world's steel, helped to lock in the higher prices. It meant steel companies started turning in profits that they could only have dreamt of a decade earlier.
The high point for Mr Mittal came just over two years ago when he pulled off the industry's biggest ever merger by combining Mittal Steel, his then flagship company, with Arcelor, its main rival, at a cost of nearly €27bn. ArcelorMittal, the resulting business, now accounts for nearly 10 per cent of world steel production, three times more than Nippon Steel of Japan, its closest competitor.
Until little more than a month ago, most executives in the industry were taking their lead from the Indian billionaire and staying unruffled. Speaking on October 6, Mr Mittal said he believed global steel demand could expand in 2009 by a sprightly 4-4.5 per cent after a 5 per cent increase in 2008 - so long as the problems in banking did not spin further out of control.
But this sanguine statement was followed by a run of poor financial and economic news that appears to have pushed many of the businesses that buy steel, in sectors including construction, cars and white goods, into a state of near paralysis. As a result, global steel production in September fell by 3.2 per cent, the biggest year-on-year fall since March 1999.
The steel industry has annual sales of about $1,000bn, making it one of the world's biggest production businesses - the use of steel in construction and manufacturing dwarfs that of all other metals. The impact of the drop in demand is being felt not just by steel producers but many companies that sell equipment to the industry. "In the past month, orders and inquiries have all but come to a halt," says Brian Lunn, managing director of UK-based Bronx Engineering, which makes inspection systems for steel mills.
What happens now? James Moss, a partner at First River, a US steel consultancy, has tried to answer this by analysing the three periods in the past 50 years during which global steel production suffered large falls. The first came in 1974-75, the second was 1979-82 and the third 1989-92. In these periods, the respective cumulative declines in production were 9 per cent, 14 per cent and 8 per cent. The consequences were widespread company collapses and tens of thousands of job losses.
But there are several reasons why the impact on the steel industry appears unlikely to be so bad this time around, say analysts. Mr Moss points out that the world economy is now much more dependent on growth from emerging regions such as east Asia and south America. Such areas of the world are likely to support the sector a lot better than in the previous periods, even if overall world economic growth rates will almost certainly slow.
During the earlier times of steel industry contraction, global growth in gross domestic product was only 1-2 per cent a year. However, in the next few years, even if the aftermath of the crisis lingers, annual world economic growth, helped by the developing regions, should be more like 3-4 per cent, Mr Moss says.
Also, the steel industry appears in a much better position than in the past to cope with a protracted period of decreased demand. In 2002, the industry had an estimated 200m tonnes of excess capacity, arising from plants that had been kept open even though there was not enough demand for the product. Today the figure is closer to 50m tonnes, according to Mr Shillaker of Credit Suisse. This is out of 1.3bn tonnes produced last year worldwide,
Even in China, which has many small and inefficient mills, 150 blast furnaces have shut in recent months because they were not making money, according to Zhang Xiaogang, chairman of Anshan Steel, one of China's biggest steel producers, who is also chairman of the China Iron and Steel Association. The relative lack of overcapacity should make it easier for the steel industry as a whole to stop prices falling precipitously.
Another factor helping the industry, says Michelle Applebaum, a Chicago-based consultant, is the near threefold rise in steel prices seen in the past five years. This has given steel companies a greater ability to cut production on a temporary basis rather than undertaking expensive plant shutdowns.
"In the past, about 80 per cent of the cost of producing a tonne of steel was covered by fixed costs connected to depreciation and investment charges and 20 per cent by variable costs. Now the position is more like the other way around," Ms Applebaum says. "This means the economics of steel production are today much more geared towards steelmakers being able to cut manufacturing output relatively easily, and on a short-term basis, so as to balance production with the requirement of the market. By doing this, the steel companies have a direct way to limit the fall in steel prices."
For this reason, Ms Applebaum and other commentators expect the big steelmakers to continue with their recent efforts to reduce production, normally by cutting output a little at a number of plants rather than through outright plant closures and redundancies. ArcelorMittal has already led the way, cutting production in much of its global network of plants by as much as 15 per cent year-on-year in the current quarter. The company's action has been followed by others, notably Severstal, Russia's biggest steelmaker, as well as US Steel, America's largest producer, and Corus, the European steelmaking arm of India's Tata group.
Others including Nippon Steel and JFE, also of Japan, could follow suit in the coming weeks. As a result, global steel production could in the first quarter of next year be falling at an annual rate of 20 per cent, many in the industry believe, which could be roughly in line with overall reductions in demand.
What of prices? According to Meps, a UK steel consultancy, the global average is likely to fall to $821 a tonne by January, from a high of $1,117 in July this year. On the basis that steel demand starts to pick up later in 2009, prices could start to edge up again, presaging a much better period of financial health for the world's steel makers. Meps is forecasting that world steel production - roughly equating with demand - should rise 4.2 per cent this year and 2.5 per cent next year.
While this is a much slower rate than the 7.5 per cent increase in 2007, it is a long way short of catastrophic. Somewhat gloomier, however, is World Steel Dynamics, a US consultancy, which is pencilling in falls in steel consumption this year and next of 2.6 per cent and 1 per cent respectively, followed by a 11.1 per cent surge in demand in 2010.
When Mr Mittal talks to investors and analysts next week, he is likely to come in for tough questioning about how much he will cut production in the next few months. He will also be asked to explain the status of the company's expansion programme, in particular two big plants being planned for India, which look likely to be scaled back.
Whatever he says, the past month is bound to have removed a certain amount of gloss from Mr Mittal's reputation - and made investors think rather harder than before about the value of his company's shares.
Deal blast
Acquisitions by which Lakshmi Mittal (above) built his empire:
2003 Polskie Huty Stali (Poland), $1bn
2004 International Steel Group (US), $4.5bn
2005 Hunan Valin* (China), $338m Kryvorizhstal (Ukraine), $4.8bn
2006 Arcelor (Luxembourg), €26.9bn
Sicartsa (Mexico), $1.4bn
2007 China Oriental* (China), $647m
2008 Macarthur Coal* (Australia), $606m
Erdemir* (Turkey), $869m
Sources: Dealogic, FT data * Minority stake
Special ways to stay robust in a downturn
Not everyone in the steel industry is suffering panic attacks as share prices in the sector come under assault from nervous investors. Executives of some steelmakers - particularly the businesses that make higher-value, high-specification grades of the metal - say they see decent growth opportunities even in the current economic gloom.
Olof Faxander is chief executive of SSAB, a Swedish maker of specialised steels used in applications such as high-strength parts for construction equipment. He says the company's concentration on niche products makes it less sensitive to a poor economic climate. "Even if growth in steel consumption as a whole declines, the motivating forces for a substitution from simpler steel to more advanced high-strength steel remain," Mr Faxander says.
An example is Hardox, a special type of steel made by SSAB that is used, for example, to make parts of tipper trucks. By using Hardox rather than ordinary steel, the overall weight of such a vehicle can be cut by 3.4 tonnes, Mr Faxander says. "As a result, a truck of this sort will not only use less fuel but cut emissions of carbon dioxide by 2.7 tonnes a year. As the world becomes more interested in cutting down on energy use and C0 2 output, then I envisage a big demand for this type of steel."
Karl-Ulrich Köhler, chairman of the steel division of ThyssenKrupp, the big German steelmaker, also opts for a positive view. "Yes, the economic situation has deteriorated and steel industry customers are cutting back on orders. Yet the people I talk to about future trends [in steel consumption] are still talking about growth," he says. "I don't hear people talking about no growth."
Wolfgang Leese, chief executive of Salzgitter, another large German producer, says his focus on making types of steel for which competition is limited - such as pipes for the oil and gas industry - will protect it from the worst repercussions of a slowdown. "Because of a backlog of orders for this kind of pipe, for products of this sort, we are sold out for 2009," Mr Leese says.
But all these executives know they will come in for far tougher questioning from investors than a few months ago about how they see their businesses evolving. For all the upbeat nature of the industry leaders' talk, shareholders are likely to be much more sceptical that the speciality end of the steel sector will be immune from tough times ahead.
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Why Detroit is not Wall Street
Published: October 31 2008 02:00 | Last updated: October 31 2008 02:00
There is a sense of déjà vu about Detroit. In the summer of 1979, Chrysler, having staked its business on gas-guzzling cars, was in deep trouble and angling for a government bail-out. Today, Chrysler finds itself in the same tough spot, but this time it has been joined by General Motors and Ford.
Three decades ago, Chrysler received $1.5bn in loan guarantees. The conditions attached were harsh. Jobs were cut and creditors suffered. With hindsight, the bail-out may have been a mistake and bankruptcy a better option. Today, however, there should be no doubt that a second bail-out would be wrong.
Politically, the issue now is even more sensitive because governments around the world have just bailed out the banks. Why should well-heeled bankers be saved when they caused the crisis while blue-collar workers are left to their fate?
The answer is straightforward, if not to everyone's liking. Banks are vital for the functioning of the real economy. The current banking crisis has shown how quickly lending can seize up and how damaging the consequences can be.
Had governments allowed more banks to fail after Lehman Brothers went under, the financial system would probably have collapsed. Swift government action means there is a chance of saving the economy from a severe depression. The car industry, however, is not as systemically important because it is not interconnected in the same way.
While government aid would help millions of people who are directly or indirectly dependent on the big three US carmakers, there are many more who would not benefit. Airlines might be the next to knock on the government's door and other industries would surely follow.
Moreover, the banking sector is expected to return to profitability in years to come. The overall cost to taxpayers of the banks' bailout may therefore be small. US carmakers have struggled for years and have been in relative decline compared with foreign competitors.
Consolidation will have to take place, and arguably should have happened long ago. Jobs will have to be shed, either after a merger between GM and Chrysler, or if one of the big three fails. Tested bankruptcy procedures are in place to deal with such an eventuality. Bailing out one or more of the carmakers would only delay the inevitable - and risks a substantial loss of taxpayers' money.
The funds would be better spent on helping those most affected. In the event of bankruptcy, the government should offer support for the company's crippling pension obligations. The carmakers' plight shows the limits of the US corporate welfare system and the vital need for health insurance reform.
Had the US government allowed Chrysler to fail in 1979, the domestic car industry might be in better shape now. Instead, authorities are now facing the same difficult questions yet again. This time, they should be tough and resist bail-outs in an industry laden with over-capacity. Creating a welfare system that is fair and sustainable for all involved - citizens, companies and the state - would provide far better value for money.
--------------------------------
Toyota says it will reopen US plants to ship to Mideast
AFP
Japan's Toyota Motor Corp. said on Friday it would reopen three US factories after a three-month suspension due to falling US demand, using them to produce exports for the Middle East and Latin America.
The factories in Texas, Indiana and Alabama will resume producing Sequoia sports utility vehicles and Tundra pick-up trucks by mid-November, Japan's largest automaker said.
Toyota halted operations at the three factories in August as car sales plummeted in the United States amid the global financial crisis.
But Toyota said it has decided to reopen the factories to produce 15,000 Sequoia SUVs a year for sale in the Middle East.
The factories will also make another 150 Sequoia SUVs along with 1,000 Tundra trucks to sell in Latin America, the company said.
With the decision, Toyota will no longer have any suspensions at its US factories, a Toyota spokeswoman said.
Toyota had enjoyed brisk sales and profits in the United States as strong interest in its fuel-efficient vehicles put it on course to overtake ailing General Motors as the world's top-selling automaker.
But Toyota's sales are expected to fall this year for the first time in a decade due to the global slowdown. Toyota's sales in the United States plunged 29.5 percent in September.
Toyota has been careful not to gloat about its success and stresses its role in creating jobs in the United States, hoping to avoid a protectionist backlash in its crucial market.
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10:47 GMT, Friday, 31 October 2008
Turkey denies Christians church
By Christopher Landau
BBC religious affairs correspondent
Image of the apostle Paul
The Turkish government says it is "out of the question" for it to hand over a revered medieval church where Catholics want to hold Christian services.
The church, currently run as a museum, stands in the south-eastern town of Tarsus, where St Paul was born.
The Turkish constitution guarantees freedom of religion, but Christian groups in the country believe that in practice they face discrimination.
Next week the Vatican will hold a Catholic-Muslim forum to improve ties.
It was the Cardinal Archbishop of Cologne in Germany who first challenged the Turkish government to hand over the church in Tarsus.
He has pointed out that Muslims of Turkish origin in Germany are free to worship and build new mosques, but that Christians in Turkey face substantial obstacles to their religious freedom.
The Turkish government's response to the BBC leaves no room for doubt about its intention to retain control of the church.
-------------------------------
01:26 GMT, Friday, 31 October 2008
DNA legacy of ancient seafarers
By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News
Phoenician written text on a stone (AFP/Getty)
Scientists have used DNA to re-trace the migrations of a sea-faring civilisation which dominated the Mediterranean thousands of years ago.
The Phoenicians were an enterprising maritime people from the territory of modern-day Lebanon.
They established a trading empire throughout the Mediterranean Sea in the first millennium BC.
A new study by an international team has now revealed the genetic legacy they imparted to modern populations.
The researchers estimate that as many as one in 17 men from the Mediterranean may have Phoenician ancestry.
"When we started, we knew nothing about the genetics of the Phoenicians"
Chris Tyler-Smith
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
They employed a new analytical technique to detect the subtle genetic imprint of historical migrations in present-day people. The study included DNA data from more than 6,000 men from around the Mediterranean.
From their base in present-day Lebanon, the Phoenicians spread out across the sea, founding colonies and trading posts as far afield as Spain and North Africa, where their most powerful city - Carthage - was located.
Carthage spawned the audacious military commander Hannibal, who marched an army over the Alps to challenge the Roman Empire on its own territory.
The Phoenicians have been described as the world's first "global capitalists". They controlled trade throughout the Mediterranean basin for nearly 1,000 years until finally being conquered by the Romans.
Over subsequent centuries, much of what was known about these enigmatic people was lost or destroyed.
Digging deep
"People have not really looked at this heritage, and I think we ought to be looking more," Dr Pierre Zalloua, from the Lebanese American University in Beirut, Lebanon, told BBC News.
Chris Tyler-Smith, co-author of the paper from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK, commented: "When we started, we knew nothing about the genetics of the Phoenicians. All we had to guide us was history.
Archaeologists excavating Phoenician settlement in Beirut, Lebanon "We knew where they had and hadn't settled. But this simple information turned out to be enough, with the help of modern genetics, to trace a vanished people."
The new findings have emerged from the Genographic Project, a multi-million-dollar effort to trace human migrations using genetics. Details appear in the prestigious American Journal of Human Genetics.
The study focused on the Y, or male, chromosome, a package of genetic material carried only by men that is passed down from father to son more or less unchanged, just like a surname.
But over many generations, the chromosome accumulates small changes, or copying errors, in its DNA sequence.
These can be used to classify male chromosomes into different groups (called haplogroups) which, to some extent, reflect a person's geographical ancestry.
They looked at the genetic signatures carried on the Y chromosomes of men from former Phoenician colonies across the Mediterranean. The sites included coastal Lebanon, Cyprus, Crete, Malta, eastern Sicily, southern Sardinia, Ibiza, southern Spain, coastal Tunisia and the city of Tingris in Morocco.
They then compared the Y chromosomes of these men with those of males from nearby places where the Phoenicians had never lived.
This focussed approach uncovered a small number of recurring genetic signatures in men from the Phoenician sites. These genetic lineages also led back to the Levant region - the Phoenician homeland.
Genetic 'jacuzzi'
But several human migrations - both historic and prehistoric - have started in the Eastern Mediterranean and spread out to Europe and North Africa.
These include the migrations of early farmers from the Near East after 10,000BC, the expansion of the ancient Greeks who - like the Phoenicians - established outposts around the Mediterranean, and the Jewish diaspora.
Because of their geographical proximity, the people involved in these expansions may have carried similar genetic signatures to the Phoenicians.
"Teasing apart something that's specifically Levantine, or Phoenician, from the background of the general Neolithic expansion, or Greek colonisation, is actually quite tough"
Spencer Wells
Genographic Project director
However, the team devised special analytical methods which they say can distinguish the Phoenician input from other possibilities.
"The issue here is that the Mediterranean is a genetic jacuzzi, if you will, it's had people moving around all over the place for millennia," said Spencer Wells, director of the Genographic Project.
"Teasing apart something that's specifically Levantine, or Phoenician, from the background of the general Neolithic expansion, or Greek colonisation, is actually quite tough.
"That's why we needed this formalised approach and obviously the (large) sample sizes to detect this signal."
This strategy revealed six candidate "Phoenician" lineages. Overall, these made up 6% of genetic lineages found in modern populations from former Phoenician colonies around the Mediterranean.
That means one in 17 men from these sites could trace their male ancestry to a Phoenician, the researchers said.
Co-author Daniel Platt, from IBM's Computational Biology Center at the TJ Watson Research Center, said the study "proves that these settlements, some of which lasted hundreds of years, left a genetic legacy that persists to modern times".
Dr Wells explained that the technique used in this study could be applied to track other migrations which had subtle genetic impacts.
He cited the expansion of Celtic-speaking people from their homeland in the Harz mountains of Germany into Western and Eastern Europe during the first millennium BC.
The Genographic Project was launched in 2005, and involves National Geographic, IBM, the Waitt Family Foundation and Applied Biosystems.
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Friday, 31 October 2008
Barclays secures Middle East cash
Barclays bank branch
Barclays has announced a proposal to raise up to £7.3bn to strengthen its balance sheet.
The money will be mainly raised from the state investment funds and royal families of Qatar and Abu Dhabi.
Unlike other big UK banks, Barclays did not want to accept a bail-out from the UK government and said the move would keep it "strong and independent".
If the deal is completed as expected, the Middle Eastern investors will have an almost 32% stake in Barclays.
BBC business editor Robert Peston said the deal showed that Barclays was in a stronger position than other UK banks.
"It can probably allow itself just a small smile of self-congratulation, having avoided putting out the begging bowl to British taxpayers," our correspondent said.
BARCLAYS INVESTORS
* Qatar Holdings - 12.7%
* Challenger (Qatar) - 2.8%
* Sheikh Mansour Bin Zayed Al Nahyan (Abu Dhabi) - 16.3%
Robert Peston's blog
However, he added that the terms of the deal were not necessarily cheaper than those offered by the Treasury.
Barclays shares initially rose on the news, but later reversed course as investors worried about the cost of the funding.
In late morning trade, the shares were down 9.14%, or 18.75p, at 186.5p.
Qatar and Abu Dhabi
Sheikh Mansour Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of Abu Dhabi's royal family, is investing up to £3.5bn in Barclays.
If the deal is completed as expected, he will end up with a 16.3% stake in the bank.
"The board believes that this maintains Barclays as a strong, independent and well-capitalised bank"
Marcus Agius, Barclays chairman
It is also raising up to £2bn from Qatar Holdings and £300m from Challenger, controlled by Qatar's Royal Family.
That could leave the two Qatari investment vehicles, which already have small holdings in Barclays, with stakes of 6.2% and 2.8% respectively.
Barclays is also seeking to raise an additional £1.5bn from existing institutional investors such as pension funds.
'Independent'
Barclays said the plan allowed the bank to fulfil the capital raising requirements stipulated by the UK government.
"The board believes that this maintains Barclays as a strong, independent and well-capitalised bank," said Marcus Agius, Barclays chairman.
The government is injecting £37bn into Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB and HBOS to avoid a collapse of the sector.
However, in return for the rescue, they must give major stakes to the government and halt cash bonuses for bank board members this year.
HSBC, along with Barclays, opted not to seek cash from the government.
In a trading update, Barclays said its profits before tax in the nine months to the end of September were better than in the same period last year although it did not give a figure.
This is despite a £1.2bn write-down on the value of assets hit by the financial crisis, the bank said.
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13:55 GMT, Thursday, 30 October 2008
Migrant staff 'abused' in Jordan
Bruised arm of a female domestic worker in Jordan (Pic: Amnesty)
Migrant domestic workers in Jordan face physical abuse, long hours and poor conditions, human rights group Amnesty International has said in a report.
It said some of the women were forced to work 19 hours a day and had pay denied by employers who beat them.
In one case, a Filipina woman was beaten in a locked room by a man her employer's family had asked to carry out the attack.
Jordan is considering laws defining employment conditions.
This includes working hours and rest time for domestic workers.
Amnesty called for better legal protection and shelter for those fleeing abuse or exploitation.
Shelters already exist at the embassies of Indonesia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka - where most of the country's 40,000 registered women migrant domestic workers come from.
Amnesty International Middle East and North Africa deputy programme director Philip Luther said: "We call on the Jordanian authorities to seize this golden opportunity to make the exploitative conditions currently faced by migrant domestic workers a thing of the past.
"Their actions should be bold enough to match the scale of the abuses."
The Jordanian parliament is considering legislation defining employment terms for domestic migrant workers, including working hours and rest time.
--------------------------------
MT, Friday, 31 October 2008
Chinese melamine scandal widens
A food stall in Hong Kong ( Oct 2008)
The toxic chemical melamine is probably being routinely added to Chinese animal feed, state media has reported.
Correspondents say the unusually frank reports in several news outlets are an admission that contamination could be widespread throughout the food chain.
The melamine scandal began early in September, when at least four Chinese babies were killed by contaminated milk, and thousands more became ill.
The news led firms across Asia to recall products made from Chinese milk.
The problem widened last weekend when the authorities in Hong Kong reported that melamine had also been detected in Chinese eggs.
Four brands of eggs have since been found to be contaminated, and agriculture officials speculate that the cause was probably melamine-laced feed given to hens.
Melamine is high in nitrogen, and the chemical is added to food products to make them appear to have a higher protein content.
'Open secret'
Several state newspapers carried reports on Thursday suggesting that the addition of melamine to animal feed was widespread.
Eggs on sale in China "The feed industry seems to have acquiesced to agree on using the chemical to reduce production costs while maintaining the protein count for quality inspections," the state-run China Daily said in an editorial.
"We cannot say for sure if the same chemical has made its way into other types of food," the newspaper added.
The practice of mixing melamine into animal feed is an "open secret" in the industry, the Nanfang Daily reported.
Chinese officials have been criticised for initially covering up the melamine scandal - as they have in the past for other health scares.
Despite a nationwide campaign to raise food safety standards and reassure consumers, China's broken-down food safety inspectorate is still failing to catch and report lapses in standards when they happen.
Analysts say that Friday's news reports are an unusual departure for Chinese officials, marking what amounts to a tacit government admission that the problem could affect many parts of the food supply.
------------------------------
MT, Thursday, 30 October 2008
'Oldest Hebrew script' is found
Fragment of pottery from Khirbet Qeiyafa
Five lines of ancient script on a shard of pottery could be the oldest example of Hebrew writing ever discovered, an archaeologist in Israel says.
The shard was found by a teenage volunteer during a dig about 20km (12 miles) south-west of Jerusalem.
Experts at Hebrew University said dating showed it was written 3,000 years ago - about 1,000 years earlier than the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Other scientists cautioned that further study was needed to understand it.
Preliminary investigations since the shard was found in July have deciphered some words, including judge, slave and king.
The characters are written in proto-Canaanite, a precursor of the Hebrew alphabet.
King David
Lead archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel identified it as Hebrew because of a three-letter verb meaning "to do" which he said was only used in Hebrew.
"That leads us to believe that this is Hebrew, and that this is the oldest Hebrew inscription that has been found," he said.
The shard and other artefacts were found at the site of Khirbet Qeiyafa, overlooking the Valley of Elah where the Bible says the Israelite David fought the Philistine giant Goliath. Map showing Jerusalem
Mr Garfinkel said the findings could shed significant light on the period of King David's reign.
"The chronology and geography of Khirbet Qeiyafa create a unique meeting point between the mythology, history, historiography and archaeology of King David."
But his colleagues at Hebrew University said the Israelites were not the only ones using proto-Canaanite characters, therefore making it difficult to prove it was Hebrew and not a related tongue spoken in the area at the time.
Hebrew University archaeologist Amihai Mazar said the inscription was "very important", as it is the longest proto-Canaanite text ever found.
"The differentiation between the scripts, and between the languages themselves in that period, remains unclear," he said.
----------------------------
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Soros sees 'shakeout' downsizing hedge fund world
Wed Oct 29, 2008 6:39am EDT
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By Scott Malone
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) - The global financial crisis will reduce the hedge-fund industry to as little as a third of its current size, billionaire investor George Soros said on Tuesday.
"The hedge-fund industry is going to move through a shakeout," Soros, one of the world's first hedge-fund managers and still among the best known, said on Tuesday in a speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"In my estimation (the industry) will be reduced in size by anywhere between half and two thirds," he said. He did not specify if he was talking about the number of funds or the amount of money invested in them.
Many of the ultra-wealthy investors who fueled a doubling in hedge-fund industry assets to about $1.9 trillion (1.1 trillion pounds) across roughly 10,000 of the loosely regulated funds worldwide in the last three years have been pulling their money out, fearful of hedge-fund failures.
To stabilize the economy, regulators should oversee credit markets, which will make some aspects of the financial services business less profitable, said Soros, one of the first voices to proclaim the severity of the current financial meltdown.
"You must regulate credit as well as money and that does require more regulation," he added. "Undoubtedly, the financial business will not be as profitable as it has been in the past 25 years."
In recent years, finance companies accounted for as much as 40 percent of U.S. corporate profitability, said Soros.
"That was an excess and that we will not come back to," he said. "Regulation will certainly make some businesses unprofitable and certain businesses that rely on excessive leverage ... will prove to be unworkable."
'NEW MISSION' FOR IMF
Soros, 78, said the International Monetary Fund needs to move to protect emerging markets or else today's global financial system will not last.
"The IMF has a new mission. It has to protect the periphery against the storm at the center," Soros said, referring to the U.S. and developed Western economies that are at the center of the global credit crunch.
"Unless actually the United States now leads an international effort to stabilize the system which includes the peripheral countries, I think the system will not continue."
A staunch Democratic Party supporter, Soros said he did not expect such a move out of the current White House.
"I don't expect this president to do it but I expect the next president to do it because otherwise the system will not continue, there will be a different system that will emerge and the United States will not have the influence that it has today," Soros said.
Soros, chairman of Soros Fund Management, supported U.S. presidential hopeful Barack Obama during the Democratic primaries, and his views on public policy are more like those of the Illinois senator than his rival for the Oval Office, Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona.
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Friday, October 31, 2008
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Beware the unwinding of the yen carry trade
Beware the unwinding of the yen carry trade
By David Pilling
Published: October 29 2008 20:15 | Last updated: October 29 2008 20:15
We are used to the concept that when a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil all manner of unspeakable things happen in New Jersey and Tunbridge Wells. But many have struggled to understand the link between Mrs Watanabe’s mood swings and the price level of exotic currencies, distant equity markets and sundry commodities. What, in short, does a Japanese housewife have to do with the price of tea in China?
Mrs Watanabe is crude shorthand for Japan’s $15,000bn pool of savings, the deepest in the world and worth more than the annual economic output of the US. These vast resources are somewhat apocryphally marshalled by Japanese women, who have traditionally held a firm grip on family finances.
In fact, Mrs Watanabe is very crude shorthand indeed: she is just as likely to be Mr Watanabe, the manager of a Japanese life assurance company portfolio, or Mr Smith, an American hedge fund manager, borrowing in yen to buy South African rand, US mortgage-backed securities or tea futures. Whoever, she is, she borrowed cheaply in yen, courtesy of Japan’s rock-bottom interest rates – which have been stuck between zero and 0.5 per cent since 1999 – and put the money in higher-yielding assets abroad.
The important thing to know about Mrs Watanabe is that, temporarily at least, she has all but stopped flapping her wings. In the past days, as spectacular moves in global currencies reveal, the carry trade has been violently unwound. With last week’s panic retreat from risk assets of almost every description came a dramatic rise in the yen, partially reversed in the past two days on rumours of a Japanese interest rate cut. Even so, the yen was trading on Wednesday at about Y97 to the dollar, the other “safe haven” currency, against a remarkably steady Y110-Y120 in recent years.
The yen carry trade has not been the only cheap source of liquidity in recent years. But Ashraf Laidi, chief currency strategist at CMC Markets, reckons it has been the biggest. He quotes figures suggesting that Japanese households alone, discounting savings mediated through life assurers and other institutions, have mobilised $500bn in outbound funds. That leaves aside speculators, who have borrowed unknowable amounts of yen to invest abroad, often on highly leveraged terms.
Just as state bank bail-outs risk moral hazard, more recklessness and the need for future bail-outs, so the unwinding of the carry trade carries with it the danger of the next great bubble. In Japan, the central bank appears to have reacted to a rising yen and sinking stock market by contemplating the uncontemplatable: a rate cut. Even the rumour of such has provoked a mini equity rally and a weakening of the currency.
This is poison for the BoJ. It hated having to keep rates low, fearing that cheap money can cause bubbles in real estate, in capital investment and in the carry trade. Its sightings of inflationary danger everywhere provoked mirth among outside experts. But few are laughing now.
The BoJ might feel vindicated. Even so, it may have to do the opposite of what it wants by cutting rates to avoid the danger of sharp economic contraction. The risks are compounded by the renewed danger of deflation, a ghoulish presence for a decade that, thanks to sliding commodity prices, could come back to haunt Japan.
If Japan really is about to reverse course towards zero interest rates, it will once again become the source of almost free money for anyone with an appetite to invest. Worse even than that, says Mr Laidi, is the potential for an even more dangerous dollar carry trade. The Federal Reserve has been desperately cutting rates, and lopped another half point off again on Wednesday. The nearer US interest rates approach zero, the greater the incentive to move dollars into higher-yielding assets elsewhere.
These gyrations do nothing to solve the underlying problem, which is that Asia has an excess of savers and the US and Europe an excess of spenders. Unless that is solved, the world seems condemned to repeat the swings of recent years, as capital is arbitraged between countries where money is cheap to those where it is expensive.
Until recently, one of Mrs Watanabe’s favourite wheezes was to take her Japanese yen and put them in Australian dollars, earning her a roughly six-point interest rate gain. This week, she – and those who travel with her – will not have missed the fact that Iceland just raised its interest rate to 18 per cent. That is a 17.5 point differential with Japan, and counting. Krona, anyone?
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Mars ‘shocked’ by destruction of safe chocolates
By John Aglionby in Jakarta
Published: October 29 2008 19:22 | Last updated: October 29 2008 19:22
Mars said yesterday it was “shocked” that Indonesia had confiscated and destroyed thousands of cartons of its sweets because of melamine contamination fears even though tests had shown they were safe to eat.
Indonesia’s Food and Medicine Supervision Agency, BPOM, confirmed 2,000 cartons of Snickers and M&Ms had been destroyed but refused to explain why or comment on the case, which Mars said had cost it half the year’s predicted revenue.
The case highlights the challenges of investing in Indonesia, where officials sometimes appear to act arbitrarily.
Mars is one of several global food companies to have been caught up in China’s melamine-tainted dairy products scandal. More than 10,000 Chinese children have fallen ill this year, with at least four dying, after manufacturers put dangerously high levels of the poisonous chemical in milk powder and other foods.
The confectioner’s troubles began on September 27 when tests conducted by the Indonesian food and drugs regulator showed some Snickers bars and packets of M&Ms made with Chinese dairy products contained 24.44 and 856.3 parts per million of melamine respectively. The US Food and Drug Administration says 2.5ppm is the maximum allowed level.
The regulator’s results, which Khaled Rabbani, a regional director of Mars, said were “flawed”, contradicted Chinese government test results and, according to Mars, results from more than 400 tests worldwide which all ruled their products were safe.
On October 23, BPOM seized Mars’s confectionery. Three days later Mars and BPOM conducted joint tests on the seized sweets which, according to results seen by the Financial Times, detected no melamine in the Snickers and 0.03-0.05ppm of melamine in the M&Ms. On Tuesday BPOM wrote to Mars saying the sweets would be destroyed.
Mr Rabbani said: “We understand there are melamine issues in the region and that BPOM needs to send a strong message to the nation that the food supply is safe. But we were shocked that our products were destroyed.”
Mr Rabbani said the company remained committed to Indonesia in spite of the incident.
Husniah Thamrin, the head of BPOM, confirmed the sweets had been destroyed but declined to comment further.
Mars’ woes in Indonesia extend to the legal sector where two courts have ruled against it in a dispute with its former distributor. Mars has appealed to the supreme court.
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Moscow agrees oligarch bail-out
By Catherine Belton in Moscow
Published: October 29 2008 23:42 | Last updated: October 29 2008 23:42
Russia’s state development bank on Wednesday approved $10bn (£6bn, €8bn) in refinancing for the country’s cash-strapped oligarchs. This came as the first step of a $50bn government bail-out that could redraw Russia’s business landscape.
As part of the package, Oleg Deripaska’s UC Rusal holding company was set to receive a $4.5bn loan. It will use it to repay in full a syndicate of western banks, including Royal Bank of Scotland and Merrill Lynch, that Mr Deripaska has been scrambling to pay by a Friday deadline, people familiar with the situation said.
The approval of the government loan – to be disbursed in the next few weeks – would make it easier for Rusal to persuade the banks to agree an extension of the deadline until the end of November, these people said. “It looks like everything is slotting into place,” said one person close to the creditors.
Mr Deripaska, Russia’s richest man, has been racing to secure state refinancing for the loan after the value of the 25 per cent stake in Norilsk Nickel he pledged as collateral tumbled in breach of covenants. Earlier efforts to win refinancing from the western banks failed.
The Russian government is likely to exact a high price, however, for providing the lifeline to his empire.
The terms of the bail-out package were yet to be hammered out, one person close to the situation said.
However, government officials have said the state development bank, VEB, would demand the same stakes as collateral as those pledged to the western banks.
As a result, Mr Deripaska’s stake in Norilsk, the world’s biggest nickel miner, is likely to remain under pressure.
Some government factions are eyeing the creation of a state metals and mining champion and Mr Deripaska is already battling rival owner Vladimir Potanin for control of the company.
Rusal declined to comment on Wednesday, as did VEB, although it confirmed $10bn in loans had been approved.
Mikhail Fridman’s Alfa Group will also be a recipient of the first wave of state bail-out funds after his telecoms arm, Altimo, failed to meet margin calls last week on $2bn in loans from a syndicate of western banks led by Deutsche Bank.
People close to the creditors said Deutsche Bank had received a letter of credit from VEB on Tuesday.
This allowed the two sides to agree that the loans would be repaid in full.
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Syria Warns it May Close US Embassy
By VOA News
29 October 2008
The U.S. embassy in Syria's capital has issued a warning to Americans in the country to be alert following a raid on eastern Syria that Damascus blames on U.S. forces.
The embassy says "unforeseen events" could prompt officials to close the embassy to the public indefinitely.
Syria has protested to the United Nations about Sunday's deadly helicopter raid.
In a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon released Tuesday, Syria urged U.N. member states to prevent a repeat of the attack, calling it a serious violation of Syria's sovereignty.
Syria's letter also says the U.N. Security Council should take action against those responsible for the raid, saying it killed eight Syrian civilians, including children. The identity of the casualties has not been independently verified.
Syria's government ordered the closure of an American school and a U.S. cultural center in Damascus on Tuesday in apparent retaliation for the helicopter assault.
The Bush administration has refused to confirm or deny carrying out the attack.
But, U.S. officials, speaking anonymously, say the operation appears to have killed al-Qaida leader Abu Ghadiyah who smuggled weapons and foreign fighters into Iraq.
Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh criticized the attack Tuesday, saying his country "rejects" the operation and does not want its territory to be used for attacks on neighboring countries.
Al-Dabbagh also called on Damascus to crack down on insurgents who use Syria as a base to train and launch attacks on Iraq. Baghdad has said that Sunday's helicopter raid targeted such an area.
Syria expressed apparent displeasure with Iraq's reaction, postponing a meeting of Syrian and Iraqi officials planned for November in Baghdad.
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Belarus to liberalise for IMF loan
By Jan Cienski in Minsk
Published: October 29 2008 09:26 | Last updated: October 29 2008 18:53
Belarus is promising to reform its economy and sell off some state assets as it holds talks with the International Monetary Fund on a possible $2bn loan as a “security cushion” in case of further turbulence from the global financial crisis.
Minsk has used about 10 per cent of its foreign currency reserves, which now stand at about $4.9bn, over the last month as it tried to support the Belarusian rouble.
Belarus, which has a relatively underdeveloped financial sector, was not affected by the initial shock of the crisis, but it has been hit by turmoil in Russia, its main trading partner, and neighbouring Ukraine.
“In the first phase Belarus was only minimally affected. But in the second phase, with terms of trade becoming worse, we anticipate certain problems will confront our exporters,” Vasily Matyushevsky, the deputy chairman of the central bank, told reporters on Wednesday.
The IMF has already agreed to loan Hungary $25.1bn and Ukraine $16.5bn. An IMF delegation arrived in Minsk on Sunday and is holding talks with the Belarusian government.
“It is needed to safeguard against any shocks or stresses,” said Andrei Kobyakov, the deputy prime minister, adding that if the economic situation improved Belarus might end up not needing the loan.
Belarus, one of Europe’s last authoritarian states, has long been one of Russia’s closest allies but in the last year has been cautiously opening itself to the west. In September it increased the permitted foreign stake in local banks to rise from 25 to 50 per cent. The government is also planning to sell off four state owned banks as well as other state owned enterprises.
“We are taking steps to improve the business climate of our country, to ensure a continued inflow of foreign direct investment,” said Mr Matyushevsky.
Belarus is also in the final stages of negotiating a $2bn loan from Russia, which supplies Belarus with most of its oil and gas. Mr Kobyakov denied that the terms of the loan were tied to Belarusian recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two breakaway regions of Georgia that Russia says are independent states.
“The Russian loan is not linked to the global economic crisis, although in today’s situation it is coming just in time,” he said.
The Belarusian economy grew by 8.2 per cent last year and the government expects growth this year to be at least 10 per cent.
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Case lays Abramovich’s interests bare
By Megan Murphy, Law Courts Correspondent
Published: October 30 2008 02:45 | Last updated: October 30 2008 02:45
The luxurious lifestyle and labyrinthine business holdings of Roman Abramovich, the billionaire Russian owner of Chelsea Football Club, were on Wednesday laid bare in a potentially landmark ruling over a Siberian oil dispute.
In the latest of a series of English cases to delve into the historically opaque dealings of the oligarchs, Mr Abramovich successfully defended efforts to sue him in London for allegedly defrauding a bankrupt Russian oil company out of billions of dollars.
Rather unusually, the 134-page ruling details everything from the business magnate’s vast property holdings, to the exact amount of days he has spent in the UK over the past seven years.
Even for an oligarch, Mr Ambramovich appears wedded to a hectic schedule.
Spending time at his myriad of chartered yachts, his “seven or eight” flats in Knightsbridge, London, his ski chalets in Colorado, the €230m ($303m, £183m) chateau in France and his three homes in Russia, means that Mr Abramovich boards an aircraft between 10 and 15 times a month.
Much more importantly for his fellow oligarchs, however, was Mr Justice Christopher Clarke’s ruling that Mr Abramovich was primarily resident in Russia at the time the suit was filed, in spite of his substantial interests in the UK.
It emerged that a “very large” percentage of his visits to England – as much as 92 per cent in any given year – were specifically connected with Chelsea matches, rather than any personal or professional ties.
The football club, bought by Mr Abramovich in 2003 and on which he has lavished around £500m, was described as a “hobby and a leisure interest” by Mr Justice Clarke in his lengthy judgment.
“It is not a business investment,” the judge said. “The sums that Mr Abramovich has given to the club far exceed any return that could possibly be expected.”
Legal experts said the decision may help other international business titans fend off attempts to sue them in the UK if they spend most of their time in other countries.
Adrian Lifely, a lawyer at law firm Osborne Clarke, said it would “close the door” on an anticipated flood of claims targeting oligarchs and wealthy foreigners who own property in London.
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Congo reignites
Published: October 30 2008 02:00 | Last updated: October 30 2008 02:00
The war that has claimed more victims than any other since world war two is reigniting at potentially horrific cost. Several million Congolese died before international efforts to broker peace began to bear fruit in 2003. The United Nations' largest peacekeeping force has since prevented a legacy of localised conflicts regaining nationwide momentum, although atrocities have continued on a monstrous scale. This time, however, the pattern of fighting, and of bellicose statements emanating from neighbouring capitals, bears alarming similarities to events that led in the past to a devastating regional war.
Ethnic Tutsi rebels allied to neighbouring Rwanda are poised to capture the eastern city of Goma, where UN forces have their principal base. More than a million displaced villagers risk being cut off from aid. Congolese government troops are on the run and Kinshasa is appealing to Angola to intervene on its behalf. History is repeating itself. Britain and America - as Rwanda's principal western allies - risk playing a proxy role in a possible bloodbath and collapse of the UN mission if they fail to use their leverage.
A conflagration is inevitable if Rwanda becomes more explicitly involved. The Rwandan government denies supporting renegade commander and alleged war criminal Laurent Nkunda, who is threatening to take his battle to Kinshasa, 1,500km away. But if Kigali has not already contrived to make his latest offensive possible, it is intervening on his behalf now, exchanging fire with Congolese troops.
The Kinshasa government is far from saintly itself. It holds part of the blame for the collapse of a ceasefire accord signed last year. The UN mission has proved only partially effective. A policy of containment has cooled tensions but left causes unaddressed. Among these is the continued presence in eastern Congo of Hutu militias, bearing the same philosophy that fuelled the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Few analysts believe they pose a significant threat to Rwanda now. But they provide a pretext for General Nkunda to maintain a standing army to protect the business interests of wealthy minority Tutsis.
Speaking about Russia in Georgia, David Miliband, Britain's foreign secretary, said this week that whatever the rights or wrongs, they did not justify one country invading another. Britain is Rwanda's largest bilateral donor. The US is a key ally too. Together they have influence in Central Africa, which they did not have in the Caucasus, to prevent Rwanda crossing Congo's border and to force it to restrain Gen Nkunda.
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The Short View: Markets get what they want
By John Authers
Published: October 29 2008 18:48 | Last updated: October 29 2008 18:48
Markets have got what they wanted. Ahead of Wednesday’s monetary policy meeting of the Federal Reserve, Fed Funds futures indicated certainty that the target Fed Funds rate would drop from 1.5 to 1 per cent. The only doubt was whether the Fed would signal continuing concern about inflation; and it chose to flag only risks to growth.
For the sake of the stock markets, it is just as well that the Fed came through with a half-point cut. European stocks had just completed a 24-hour surge that had started in the US and Asia. That move undid falls of the previous week and was correlated with a move back out of the yen and dollar and into other currencies.
The cumulative effect of these moves shows that world markets still lack a clear compass. The UK’s FTSE-100 closed 21.8 per cent higher, in dollar terms, than its mid-session low on Monday. A disappointment from the Fed might have been hard to handle.
This latest market spasm is not all about central banks. Last week’s sell-off of all currencies against the yen and the dollar was driven by “deleveraging” as hedge funds strove to pay off debts (often in yen), exit risky trades and bring money home to the US. Tuesday’s sudden reversal may indicate that that forced selling is ending.
Yet it also appears to reflect a bet that the forex markets had left both the Fed and the Bank of Japan with no choice but to cut rates. The dollar had gained almost 16 per cent against a trade-weighted index of currencies, in barely a month. Meanwhile the yen gained 18 per cent against the dollar and 33 per cent against the euro in a matter of weeks.
If the market can get through the week without accident, the chances for the long-awaited rally look good. The next event is the BoJ’s meeting on Friday. According to Credit Suisse, the chance that it cuts rates has this week risen from 15 per cent to 55 per cent.
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Bank of China books 3.8 billion dollars in investment losses
AFP
Bank of China said it had posted 26.3 billion yuan (3.8 billion dollars) in potential losses on assets at the end of September, partially related to US subprime mortgage-backed securities.
China's largest foreign exchange bank also reported a net profit of 17.8 billion yuan in the third quarter, up 11.5 percent from a year earlier, according to a filing with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange late Wednesday.
The potential losses on assets for the first nine months of the year more than doubled from 10.8 billion yuan a year earlier due to new paper losses on loans and foreign currency investment securities, the bank said.
Bank of China (BoC) said it held US subprime mortgage-related debt securities valued at 3.3 billion dollars at the end of September. The loss on paper was 2.0 billion dollars on those securities.
The bank said it also owned 6.2 billion dollars in debt securities issued by troubled US mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
In addition, it held 1.4 billion dollars of securities backed by Alt-A mortgage, a category of loans with credit risks between prime and subprime loans.
The bank added it had booked a 65 million-dollar charge for the holdings of 76 million dollars worth of bonds issued by collapsed US investment bank Lehman Brothers.
It also faced a 45 million-dollar charge for 53 million dollars in loans its New York branch had extended to Lehman and its units.
Although the exposure accounted for only a small portion of its total assets of 962.8 dollars, analysts said BoC faces a more challenging environment compared to other Chinese banks due to its bigger foreign exchange securities portfolio and overseas operations.
Meanwhile, earnings growth in the third quarter slowed from the first half when its net profit grew 42.8 percent from a year earlier as bank profits were hurt by a slowing domestic economy and falling interest rates.
China's economic growth weakened to nine percent in the third quarter, the slowest in about five years. The central People's Bank of China cut key interest rates on Wednesday in a bid to spur economic growth, the third such move in six weeks.
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Britain's Brown in Gulf to seek world bailout plan support
AFP Katherine Haddon
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown embarks on a mini-tour of oil-rich Gulf states Saturday, but could struggle to win support for his plan to boost funds available to nations hit by global economic chaos.
Brown will head to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar in a four-day visit and is likely argue to that Gulf states should be among the biggest donors to an expanded International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout scheme.
"It's the countries that have got substantial reserves, the oil-rich countries and others who are going to be the biggest contributors to this fund," Brown said before the trip, adding he also wanted China to contribute.
"I am going to the Gulf at the weekend and it is one of the items that will be in the discussions with all the international leaders."
But the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), whose top producer is Saudi Arabia and which counts the UAE and Qatar as members, says it sees no reason its members should bail out a crisis which originated in the US.
And experts say that even if Gulf states do step in to bail out countries hit by the downturn, they would probably not want to do it through the IMF .
Adam Dixon of consulting firm Oxford Analytica said they might prefer a "piggyback strategy" where they top up funds for countries like Pakistan from the IMF, which they see as dominated by the US and G7 countries.
"In terms of funneling it (the money) through the IMF, I don't think so," he told AFP.
The IMF, which has or is about to bail out Hungary, Ukraine and Iceland, currently has a 250 billion dollar bail-out fund, but Brown wants this extended to stop economic "contagion" spreading to other countries.
His trip to the Gulf comes ahead of a meeting of G20 leaders in Washington including Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah on November 15 which will likely discuss a restructuring of the world financial system, including the IMF.
The Gulf states, whose main economic driver is oil, have been hit by its price dropping below 60 dollars a barrel this week from record highs of nearly 150 dollars in July on fears of falling demand because of the slowdown.
Brown drew the ire of OPEC and Gulf leaders for speaking against OPEC's decision at an emergency meeting last week to cut oil output by 1.5 million barrels a day from November in a bid to buoy up prices.
Dixon said that, although most Gulf states were still flushed with cash, they would probably use the falls in oil prices as "the excuse" if they did not want to back Brown's plan.
OPEC's Secretary General Abdalla Salem El-Badri said Tuesday it was "surprising" that OPEC countries, which produce around 40 percent of the world's crude, were being asked to "bail out" the economic crisis.
"This crisis created in the (United) States must be solved within the States," he told an oil conference in London. Later he said he would not rule out another oil production cut.
Qatar's energy minister and deputy premier Abdulla bin Hamad al-Attiyah added at the same event that Britain and the US should not criticise the output cut without suggesting how more people could be encouraged to buy oil.
"You can't say to me 'don't do it, you're the bad boy' but with no solution," he said.
Meanwhile, UAE Energy Minister Mohamed Bin Dhaen Al Hamli said low oil prices were "very dangerous" for the world economy, adding that a "reasonable" price was needed to ensure continued investment.
As well as fears about how high oil prices could hit the global economy, Brown is facing pressure at home to reduce household fuel and petrol bills as householders face a likely recession in Britain.
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French billionaire to launch Polish bank
Yesterday, 06:24 pm
AFP
* Print Story
The Carlo Tassara investment group owned by French billionaire Romain Zaleski will launch a new bank in Poland next month backed with an investment of 450 million euros (562 million dollars), Alior Bank said Wednesday.
Alior said it would formally begin business on November 17, starting with 80 branches and aiming to have 200 by 2012 as an initial staff of 1,300 rises to 3,300.
It said it was targeting a two percent share of the retail banking market and four percent for business clients by 2012.
Bank officials said that now is a good time to launch, with the global financial crisis no obstacle.
"I would say, paradoxically, that this is a good time to open a new bank. The prospects of a recession are quite low," Alior head Wojciech Sobieraj told a news conference.
"Being new on the market is also an advantage. We don't have toxic debt or loans with low margins that have to be dealt with for years," she said.
Sobieraj, a high-profile local banker, got the idea two years ago and eventually won Zaleski's backing.
"We were considering investing in the banking sector and we liked Wojciech Sobieraj's project," said Zaleski's daughter, Helene Zaleski, a senior executive at Carlo Tassara and now a member of the Alior supervisory board.
Zaleski, whose parents were from Poland, made his fortune in steel and energy in France and Italy.
Carlo Tassara now holds major shares of French groups EDF and Vinci, and Italy's Intesa Sanpaolo, Edison and Generali.
The move to set up an ultra-modern banking operation, targeting a well-educated urban clientele, took one year to bear fruit, said Helene Zaleski.
Among the bank's hallmarks will be a service that is as paper-free as possible, with touch-screen signatures and mobile telephone text message transaction confirmations, as well as a weekly Internet chat between the board and customers.
When the serious planning began in September 2007, few expected the US real estate crisis to spill over into the global financial markets.
Even in the current climate, Alior seems unfazed.
Helene Zaleski pointed to the banking potential of Poland, a market she knows well after having worked in its insurance sector in the 1990s.
"There's still room for a large bank in Poland," she said.
"There are far fewer branches per head than in western Europe and much less liquidity deposited in banks here," she said.
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Blanchflower Says U.K. Needs Rate Cuts as Deflation Risk Looms
By Brian Swint and Jennifer Ryan
Oct. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Bank of England policy maker David Blanchflower said U.K. interest rates need to fall soon and ``significantly'' to stave off the threat of deflation as the economy endures a recession throughout the next year.
``Interest rates do need to come down significantly -- and quickly,'' Blanchflower said in a speech at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England, yesterday. ``If rates are not cut aggressively we do face the prospect of a relatively deep and long-lasting recession.''
The Federal Reserve cut its interest rate to 1 percent yesterday and said that downside risks to economic growth remain. Blanchflower has argued that the U.K. economy faces similar conditions to the U.S. and voted for a rate cut at every meeting in the past year, pressing for a half-point reduction to 4.5 percent before the Bank of England delivered it this month.
``U.K. output will continue to contract in 2008 and 2009,'' Blanchflower said. ``My concern is that inflation will be below 1 percent -- and maybe even negative.''
Inflation accelerated to 5.2 percent in September, the fastest pace in at least 11 years. The bank predicts it will soon start to slow toward the 2 percent target.
The Monetary Policy Committee voted unanimously to lower the interest rate on Oct. 8 after the financial crisis crippled the British banking industry. It will cut the rate by a further half point at the next scheduled meeting on Nov. 6, according to the median forecast of 30 economists in a Bloomberg News survey.
Darling's Pledge
The crisis has forced Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling to buy stakes in banks, raising spending. He signaled late yesterday that the Treasury will pay down debt once the economy recovers. The European Investment Bank will lend 4 billion pounds ($6.6 billion) to U.K. companies struggling to borrow because of the credit crunch, the Treasury said today.
Monetary policy has so far not been ``sufficiently forward looking'' and it has been ``apparent for some time'' that the U.K. is in a recession, Blanchflower said.
While other policy makers have argued that accelerating inflation will encourage Britons to push for higher wages, Blanchflower said that price expectations will fall. ``The British people are smart enough to have actually noticed that inflation is coming down fast,'' he said.
The pound's depreciation won't be inflationary because it will be offset by the more than 50 percent drop in oil prices since then, Blanchflower said. Companies would also have trouble passing on any higher costs as demand weakens, he said.
Job Losses
Jobless claims rose to the highest level in almost two years in September, the statistics office reported Oct. 15. The U.K. economy shrank 0.5 percent in the third quarter, the largest contraction since 1990.
Blanchflower said that happened before the global financial crisis flared up, following the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in September. The intensification of the credit squeeze that followed ``has yet to be fully felt'' by companies and households, he said.
The current financial crisis may turn out to be ``more significant'' than the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash, Blanchflower said. Still, ``it is a mistake to be overly gloomy'' because ``Britain's economy will, eventually, recover,'' he said.
In questioning after his speech, Blanchflower said that policy makers need to guard against ``systemic failure'' of the banking system. ``We're not out of the woods yet,'' he said.
Policy makers may need to reconsider how to cope with rising asset prices while consumer-price inflation remains subdued, Blanchflower said in his speech.
``The key economic policy over the last decade has been the unsustainable rise in asset and equity prices and the associated credit boom,'' Blanchflower said. ``Does mainstream theory have an adequate explanation of why things have gone so badly wrong? It is not clear that it does. It may well be time for a rethink.''
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Barclays' Leveraged Loan Sale Falters, Wall Street Journal Says
By Patricia Kuo
Oct. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Barclays Plc sold about 30 percent of the $970 million of mainly leveraged loans it is selling to wind up a derivatives agreement with hedge fund Black Diamond Capital Management LLC, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The small percentage of assets sold suggests bidders want too much of a bargain for the assets as the volume of leveraged loans for sale soars, the newspaper said, without saying where it got the information.
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Mizuho $7 Billion Loss Turned on Toxic Aardvark Made in America
By Finbarr Flynn
More Photos/Details
Oct. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Alexander Rekeda, a 34-year-old Ukrainian-born math whiz, turned in his BlackBerry and security card and sent an e-mail to his bosses at Calyon, the investment- banking unit of Credit Agricole SA. Then, along with ten colleagues from the New York structured-finance team, who fired off similar messages, he walked two blocks down the Avenue of the Americas to Mizuho Financial Group Inc.
It was Dec. 8, 2006, and Rekeda's arrival was a coup for Mizuho, Japan's second-largest bank by revenue. A month earlier, it became the first Japanese lender to list on the New York Stock Exchange since 1989 -- a move hailed by John Thain, then chief executive officer of the bourse, as a sign that Mizuho was taking ``its place among the world's leading companies.''
The hires would prove a costly blunder. Rekeda, who became head of structured credit in the Americas, and his team led Mizuho into a business it knew little about, securities backed by U.S. subprime mortgages, where it lost 672 billion yen ($7.1 billion), more than any bank in Asia. Most of the losses were related to defaults on collateralized debt obligations.
Mizuho expects as much as 20 billion yen in potential further losses on bonds and bad loans related to bankrupt Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., company spokeswoman Masako Shiono said on Sept. 16. Moody's Investors Service, citing ``questions regarding the effectiveness of Mizuho's risk management and its risk appetite,'' continues to give the bank a negative outlook.
``Mizuho never made a penny out of subprime in the good times, they just got left holding the can in the bad,'' says David Threadgold, an analyst at Fox-Pitt Kelton Asia Ltd. in Tokyo who has an ``underperform'' rating on the stock. ``They made a very poor decision to launch into the packaging of subprime products at the end of 2006.''
Toxic Assets
How a Japanese bank that traces its roots to 1864 made such a bold entry into the U.S. subprime securities market, and almost choked on the toxic assets it created, is a tale of overreaching and poor timing. It also illustrates how financial technology made in the U.S. wreaked havoc on the other side of the globe.
Many of the details are spelled out in a lawsuit Calyon filed against Mizuho in U.S. federal court seeking $750 million for ``covertly'' inducing its employees to quit. The case was settled out of court in September 2007 for an undisclosed amount. Shiono said Mizuho wouldn't comment for this article.
Rekeda, who has a master's degree in mathematics from Kiev State University of Economics in Ukraine and an MBA from the University of Connecticut, had built Calyon's CDO business over two years. He closed six deals for the French bank in 2006, according to an affidavit in the case.
Signing-On Fee
All six, including two with the celestial names Cetus and Orion, later defaulted as Paris-based Credit Agricole racked up more than 6.5 billion euros ($8.1 billion) in subprime losses. Rekeda, now 34, declined to be interviewed.
On Oct. 18, 2006, Rekeda and his team were offered an $11 million signing-on fee to defect to the Japanese bank, a Calyon lawyer said at a court hearing. Mizuho's plan to expand into the U.S. was hatched earlier that year, as Japanese lenders were recovering from a 14-year debt crisis that forced them to take $1.1 trillion in writedowns for bad loans.
Mizuho, formed in 2000 in a merger of three banks, beat out rivals Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc. to win approval from U.S. regulators to set up a financial holding company. That enabled it to operate as a full-service investment bank.
As Mizuho President Terunobu Maeda said at a press briefing on May 15 this year, the bank had excess capital and ``needed to study'' the U.S. mortgage-backed securities business.
Bad Loans
Maeda, 63, a former chairman of the Japanese Bankers Association and an amateur gardener who doesn't use air conditioners at his home during Tokyo's humid summers to make an environmental point, became president of Mizuho in April 2002. The bank recorded a loss of 2.38 trillion yen that fiscal year as it wrote off bad loans accrued during three recessions in a decade. Maeda returned it to profitability the next year after reducing non-performing assets and through gains on investments in Japanese stocks.
While Mizuho was a newcomer to the CDO market in the U.S., it had experience arranging and selling similar investments in Japan and Europe. The company had ramped up its loan- securitization business, which Japanese banks were able to do without borrowers' consent after October 1998. Merrill Lynch & Co., Bear Stearns Cos. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. all helped Japanese banks repackage and market securities backed by corporate loans and mortgages.
Rising Delinquencies
Even so, Mizuho decided it needed help in the U.S. Talks with the Calyon team began in early 2006, when Douglas Munson, a sales director for the French bank, approached golfing buddy Theodore Ake, head of fixed income for Mizuho in New York, according to two people familiar with the negotiations. The size of the group and the amount of sign-on bonuses snowballed after Rekeda was brought into the discussion, the people said. Munson and Ake declined to comment.
By the time the deal was consummated, the market was turning. On Dec. 11, 2006, the same day Mizuho announced it was setting up an office in the U.S. to create asset-backed debt securities, Fitch Ratings said the outlook for U.S. subprime mortgage bonds was ``negative.'' It expected delinquencies on those loans to rise by 50 percent.
There was also confusion about the hiring deal. The Calyon team turned out to include more than the five people expected by Hitoshi Shimoyama, then deputy president of investment banking unit Mizuho Securities USA Inc., documents in the case allege.
``Mizuho did not even know the number or names of additional persons until shortly before they came,'' Shimoyama said in a March 17, 2007, affidavit.
Bonus Pool
Benjamin Lee, one of those who defected on Dec. 8, returned to the French bank five days later. He said he ``had been misled by Rekeda'' about the terms of employment at Mizuho, according to an affidavit he filed.
Lee said he was initially told by Rekeda that he could expect $1 million to $1.5 million from a bonus pool. He later learned there was a separate contract for him and other junior members of the group that didn't include a revenue-related bonus. Senior team members were entitled to share as much as 25 percent of revenue from completed transactions, court documents said.
Rekeda's group priced its first deal within 10 weeks, after the Mortgage Bankers Association reported that the default rate on U.S. subprime loans reached 12.6 percent, the highest level since the first quarter of 2003.
Aardvark CDO
The deal was named after a squat animal with a pig-like snout that feeds on ants and termites. Incorporated as a special- purpose company in the Cayman Islands, Aardvark ABS CDO was an ugly concoction: 31 percent of its $1.5 billion of securities were backed by subprime loans, 23 percent by residential mortgages repackaged from other CDO deals, and 33 percent by Alt- A mortgages, a category just above subprime. The remaining 13 percent were prime loans.
One reason Rekeda was able to move so fast was that the deal had already been assembled by London-based Lloyds TSB Group Plc, which pulled out before completion, said three people familiar with the transaction. HarbourView Asset Management Corp., a unit of New York-based OppenheimerFunds Inc., stayed on as manager. Spokesmen for Lloyds and HarbourView declined to comment.
Moody's assigned its highest short-term rating of P-1 to $1.3 billion of the Aardvark securities. In the prospectus, Mizuho pledged to back 87 percent of the deal, meaning that the bank, rather than investors, was on the hook for most of the potential losses.
In the Pipeline
A subsequent Mizuho offering, Tigris CDO 2007-1, valued at $902 million in March 2007, was backed by the lowest investment- grade tranches of CDO deals arranged by other Wall Street firms, including Merrill, Lehman and Citigroup Inc., according to a report that month by Fitch Ratings. More than 80 percent of the securities in the CDO had Fitch's lowest investment rating, BBB-, which is nine grades below AAA.
Rekeda planned to bring at least nine more CDO deals to market within six months, the investment newsletter Asset-Backed Alert reported on May 11, 2007. The newsletter quoted him saying the bank had ``built up the pipeline.'' As of April 1, 2007, Mizuho Securities had amassed more than 550 billion yen in residential mortgage-backed securities and CDOs supported by home loans, according to the bank's financial statements.
One of those deals made it to market in June 2007: a special-purpose entity called Delphinus 2007-1. Although named after a constellation, its contents were hardly stellar. Three- quarters of its securities were based on subprime mortgages, according to a July 23 Fitch report.
Ratings Downgrade
About 80 percent of the deal was backed by credit-default swaps arranged by firms including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup and Wells Fargo & Co. Citing ``strong demand'' from investors, Mizuho increased the size of the deal that July to $1.6 billion from $1.2 billion.
That was eight days before two Bear Stearns funds were shut down, heralding the start of the subprime crisis. Less than three months later, on Sept. 27, Fitch put Delphinus on its watch list. The negative designation, Fitch analyst Kevin Kendra said at the time, was ``probably the quickest I've seen'' on a CDO. In other words, Mizuho struggled to find buyers for its CDOs and, as their values plummeted, the bank would have to absorb the loss.
Mizuho didn't tell investors about the extent of its exposure until November 2007, when it reported a 70 billion-yen loss on subprime-related securities in the first half ended Sept. 30. It also said it expected that figure to grow to 170 billion yen for the full year.
CDO Default
By December, Mizuho had halted its U.S. CDO business. It fired Rekeda and at least four others on the team, putting an end to the bank's one-year experiment with American financial technology.
In January, as delinquencies on loans that backed Mizuho's CDOs increased, Aardvark, Tigris and Delphinus went into default. Subsequent downgrades of all of the tranches of Tigris and Aardvark required the bank to write down the value of the CDOs.
Mizuho had to inject 150 billion yen of capital into its securities unit, shelve a planned merger with Shinko Securities Co. and axe 300 jobs. The bank's shares lost half their value in the fiscal year ended March 31.
When a record 2,474 shareholders gathered at the Tokyo International Forum on June 26 for the bank's annual meeting, they were out for blood.
``The responsibility rests at the top with Maeda,'' Kenjiro Endo, 66, who bought Mizuho shares when he retired from chipmaker Toshiba Corp. six years ago, said after the meeting. ``If this were overseas, he'd resign.''
`Market Crashed'
Endo may have had a point. Citigroup CEO Charles O. ``Chuck'' Prince, Merrill's Stan O'Neal and Wachovia Corp.'s Kennedy Thompson were all forced to resign after significant subprime losses. In Japan, where executives often bow and apologize for their mistakes, Mizuho's Maeda stood firm.
``Unfortunately, from October, the securitized investment- product market crashed, and even if we tried to sell the investments, it wasn't possible,'' Maeda said at the shareholders' meeting. ``When the market stops functioning, there is no measure to avoid it.''
Maeda also defended the bank's decision to enter the U.S. securities market.
``It's not because of some management failure that things turned out like this,'' he said. ``I am very sorry to tell you, doing nothing, and not taking risk, is not a bank.''
Failure to Hedge
Yet Mizuho might have incurred half as many losses if it had accelerated the sale of subprime-related investments and hedged more bets with credit-default swaps, according to a person familiar with its U.S. operations. The bank, fearing it would lose as much as two-thirds of its potential profit, decided not to hedge, the person said. Mizuho declined to comment.
``The holding company was unable to grasp the size of losses at Mizuho Securities when the subprime problem emerged,'' said Keisuke Moriyama, a Tokyo-based analyst at Nomura Holdings Inc. ``Mizuho has a governance problem. How it fixes it is the biggest issue that faces the group.''
The ultimate cost to Mizuho may be greater than the 672 billion yen it wrote down. The bank, the first in Japan to put money in U.S. financials amid the credit crunch, invested $1.2 billion in Merrill in January. The Wall Street bank's shares have slumped 70 percent this year.
`Missed Out'
Now Mizuho is sidelined as other Japanese banks swoop in to buy troubled U.S. assets. Nomura purchased some of Lehman's Asian and European businesses in September, and Mitsubishi UFJ, the nation's largest bank, acquired 21 percent of Morgan Stanley for $9 billion.
``Mizuho has totally missed out,'' said Amir Anvarzadeh, director of Japanese equity sales at KBC Financial Products in London. ``They've been very aggressive overseas, trying to grow this business organically, and some of those ambitions have come back to haunt them.''
Although it was the biggest loser, Mizuho wasn't the only Japanese bank that got hurt. In all, 672 domestic banks and credit cooperatives had 1.5 trillion yen in losses from overseas securitized products, the country's financial regulator reported Sept. 4.
Rekeda, meanwhile, has moved on. He now works for Guggenheim Capital Markets LLC in New York, along with Paolo Torti and Xavier Capdepon, who both followed him from Calyon to Mizuho. Their new jobs: selling distressed CDOs at a discount.
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Russo-Finnish-Chinese economic forum to open in Helsinki
30.10.2008, 03.26
HELSINKI, October 30 (Itar-Tass) - Energy, transport, timber industry and environment will be the key item on the agenda of a Russian-Finnish-Chinese economic forum. It’s opening in Helsinki on Thursday and will be attended by about 300 businessmen and politicians.
The Finnish Ministry organized the meeting for Employment and Economic Development, the Finnish Foreign Ministry, the Russian Ministry of Economic Development and the Chinese Ministry of Commerce.
A representative of the Russian commercial office in Finland told Itar-Tass that the forum’s aim was to expand and diversify trade, economic and innovative cooperation.
Government representatives of Finland, Russia and China will participate in plenary meetings. National experts will brief their colleagues on industrial strategies and vital projects in their countries during roundtable meetings. They will discuss the possibility of expanding cooperation in this sector of the economy.
The participants in the forum will visit several Finnish companies. The experts will present their views on the potential for future cooperation between the three countries at the last closing meeting.
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USA too naive to believe that its sanctions hurt Russia’s arms export
29.10.2008 Source: Pravda.Ru URL: http://english.pravda.ru/russia/politics/106636-usa_russia_sanctions-0
USA’s single-handed sanctions against Russia’s defense export giant, Rosoboronexport, is an attempt of unfair competition, although the sanctions will not hurt the activity of the Russian enterprise, President Dmitry Medvedev believes.
“I have already said before that we believe that such sanctions are visionless,” Medvedev said at a session of the defense cooperation committee Tuesday. “This is unfair competition, it is simply an attempt to cut off suppliers. However, this decision is practically non-sensitive for us, and those, who made the decision, must take this into their consideration,” Medvedev said. The president added that Russia’s backlogs of defense export orders enlarged considerably and was currently evaluated at over $30 billion, Interfax reports.
Medvedev reminded that Russia conducted defense cooperation with 81 countries of the world. Russia has been strengthening cooperation with many of its partners lately, for example, a framework agreement in the field of defense cooperation has been recently signed with Saudi Arabia.
Russia ’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said earlier that the USA’s single-handed sanctions against Rosoboronexport for its cooperation with Iran were absolutely unacceptable.
Dmitry Medvedev also said that Russia would pay serious attention to other countries’ efforts aimed to provide military support to the incumbent administration of Georgia.
“We know that several countries were supplying weapons to Georgia, pushing Saakashvili’s regime towards aggression. We are also aware of the fact that those countries plan to supply even more weapons to the regime,” Medvedev said Tuesday.
“Unfortunately, several of our close partners participated in the affair. We won’t forget it and we will obviously take it into our consideration in our practical policies. I would like everyone to know it,” the Russian leader said.
“We will continue our work to deliver weapons and military hardware to our partners with the only purpose of enhancing their defensive ability,” Medvedev said. He also continued with saying that many members of the international community do not stick to such an approach, which was proved during the armed conflict in the Caucasus in August of this year.
Russia ’s chief military attorney, Sergei Fridinsky, stated in September that the weapons and military hardware, which Georgia used in its aggression against South Ossetia, had been delivered from 14 different countries. He added that Georgia received most of its weapons from the United States and Ukraine.
Ukraine does not deny the sales of its weapons to Georgia, although Ukrainian officials emphasize that arms sales to Georgia were never prohibited. Spokespeople for the Ukrainian administration said that the weapons had been delivered to Georgia on a legal basis and prior to the start of the military conflict in S. Ossetia. Furthermore, Ukraine intends to continue its arms export to Georgia in accordance with previously concluded contracts.
Russia in its turn intends to develop military cooperation with members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization to create the joint missile defense system.
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Mr. Saakashvili, it is time to say goodbye
30.10.2008 Source: Pravda.Ru URL: http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/106641-saakashvili-0
The Fat Lady has sung, the BBC, mouth piece of the British Neocons, has declared that, yes, Georgia and Saakashvili in particular are guilty of the murder of civilians in South Ossetia. Of course, they quickly then backed it up by saying Russia was wrong in defending those civilians being butchered by the Georgians. After all, we would not want Russia and the Russian people to feel they were right, even when they were, now would we?
Anyways, moving right along, dear reader, we return to our useful fool, Saakashvili. Well, when one of the key propaganda organs of the Anglo-American Trotskyte Neocons declares you in the wrong and you are a petty dictator of a small nation and one, to boot, presently and from day one on the Neocon payroll, that can only mean one thing...you are done, yesterday's news, kaput.
To boot, the opposition now plans marches on the 7th of November, the day that Saakashvili sent his Anglo-American trained goons in to beat the opposition to the ground in 2007. Back then, the Anglo-American Trotskytes still cared about their puppet, so they made a few noises about his assault upon unarmed peaceful demonstrators and than quickly blamed the demonstrations on Russia, surely not on the corruption and autocracy of their favorite puppet. This year promises to be different.
Now that the puppet has been used to try to restart the Cold War and failed. Now that most of the sensible folks of Europe have told the Anglo-American Trotskytes to go pound sand and the evidence is mounting daily that Georgia is a rogue state in every definition of the word and the people will be rising up against the Soros paid, CIA/MI6 controlled puppet, the Anglo-Americans are moving to keep ahead of the situation. It is obvious that Saakashvili is useless, worse than useless now, so a new replacement must be picked, one picked by the Neocons before the Georgians manage to pick one themselves. Oh sure, just like the last 3 times, the pick will look like it came from the people but they are an easy bunch to fool.
But what about Saakashvili? Surely a man in his situation might turn to Russia for help, except for that whole little August war thing and Russia having declared him a war criminal. Can't go there. To Europe? No, to much of a liability. Azerbaijan and Turkey have both declared their worries about his fitness to rule so they are probably out. Surely not the Armenians, not after what he's done against his own Armenians. Ukraine might be an option, at least as long as Yushchenko, the withered Orange is still hanging on the branch, but that too might not be for long.
Gosh, few choices. Its times like these one checks his life insurance policy to make sure it is paid up, the West does not like loose ends.
Stanislav Mishin
The article has been reprinted with the kind permission of Stanislav Mishin and can be found on his blog Mat Rodina
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Why Russian business can not get Western clients
29.10.2008 Source: Pravda.Ru URL: http://english.pravda.ru/business/companies/106638-russian_business-0
Having spent quite some time working on developing Russian suppliers, being Russian myself and understanding Westerners and Western Business, please allow me to give the following treatise for advice.
While Russian quality and technical expertise are generally quite good to over all superior, it is the so called business office, the decision makers and their staffs, that doom Russian industry to under representation in the world of manufactured goods. Why?
The simple reason is psychological. Russian businessmen: 1. Do not understand the Western psychology in the least and 2. Have a generally higher self opinion of their own intelligence, wisdom and cleverness than evidence would uphold.
It is written in the Bible: “When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom”.
This, these businessmen, these heads of corporations, should contemplate first and then read on the rest of this treatise.
To begin with, this is not the Soviet Union, customers will not come to you and beg you to do their business. As silly as this notion may sound to many Westerners, this was the reality of the Soviet Union and is still the mindset of many older Russian businessmen. A corollary of this is: if I do not know you exist, I will not bring any business to you. Thus, and listen very carefully to this point, you must advertise. That is correct; you must invest money to get your name and your product out on the market.
Do not forget, this is a global market and there is absolutely nothing unique about Russia that would in and of itself, drive business to your Russian corporation. On expertise there is competition from the Germans, Italians, Koreans, Japanese and others. On price there is the rest of Eastern Europe, China and India. A simple example of this: the OTC (Offshore Technology Conference), the biggest oil and gas conference in the world, held yearly in Houston, Texas, USA. Of the 2,400+ companies that were represented there for the 2008 event, 3, that’s right, THREE were Russian. There were over thirty Chinese companies, along with various Chinese ministries and about as many Indian companies. Guess who will get more business?
Russian companies going to Russian expos is fine if you want to attract Russian business, it is all but pointless if you are trying to get foreigners to come trade their time and money for your goods or services.
Further, discard the notion that the Western Corporation is both rich and yet stupid or foolish. The only people who are rich and stupid are those who inherit their money, not those who earned it. Large international corporations do have fools amongst them, like any human organization, but they are not the majority but a small minority. Those of us who deal in international business, often know more about your business, from the financial side, than you do. So go ahead and drop the idea that you can hang spaghetti off of the inastrantsa (foreigner’s) ears.
Now on to the business. It is true, that most Western business initially does not run on relationships, quite the opposite, relationships are developed last, after business is already moving forward. This is of course the opposite of eastern (and thus Russian) companies. When foreigners send inquiries and even when they show up the first or sometimes the second, time, they are often ignored or given very little attention. Usually, this is will kill any chances of moving forward, period. Few Westerners will continue to push if this is the treatment their inquiries receive. Thus, when you get an inquiry, be it by email, phone call, fax or in person, it should always be treated as a chance to earn money, not an interruption of your day or your staff’s day. Do not wait till you get the second or third inquiry before taking it seriously, most of the time there will be no second or third inquiry.
Next, do not take two or three months to respond. In the West a standard response time is 1 to 2 weeks, that’s right: 5-10 business days. Indians may take a month, which is really stretching it. The average Russian time is two or more months. Again, there is nothing so special about your company that any Western businessman will stand around and wait for you to get them a quote, when you feel like it. If an RFQ (request for quotes, in other words, a bid) is run and nine out of ten companies return their quotes, by the time the Russian company gets around to sending their quote in, often time the decisions are already made and their work is simply deleted or filed away for later (if ever) review.
The business world does not wait.
Worst yet, the Russian business attitude is one of: if there is nothing to communicate I will not communicate. So while the slow as a snail quoting process is moving forward, the customer is absolutely in the dark. Often times inquiry emails or calls go unanswered. To a Western business, this is the same as telling them to go to Hell…and most will, in frustration, take their business elsewhere.
Now that we have finally submitted the quote, we get to the next point that usually kills any chance of business going forward 1. Pride and 2. Traditional haggling. Pride: the Russian businessman often thinks he is the smartest in the room (which may or may not be true) and that his opposite is a rich fool (rarely if ever true…this stereotype of foreigners has been around with us eastern Slavs for 1,200 years it’s time for it to die). Accept the fact that more than likely, the foreigner knows his business, knows what proper prices are. He has come to Russia to get 1. A high quality good for 2. A low price.
That is correct, Russia is a low cost country. With a work force that gets paid about 1/4th that of Western Europe. With steel that is 20% cheaper, energy that is 30-50% cheaper, taxes that are 30% cheaper, Western businesses come to Russia to save money and many leave very disappointed. Why? Because the greed and pride factors, along with a haggling culture, drive most initial quotes to be as high or higher than the Western industries. If I have a German supplier, why on earth would I go to Russia just to pay German or close to German prices? The answer is simple, the answer is one that Indian and Chinese businessmen understand and that Russian businessmen refuse to consider, the answer is: I would not. Especially when the German supplier often gives better service.
After having had to fight just to have a quote request taken seriously and than having to wait for months to get a quote, to get a quote that is so outrageous is simply too much for most Westerners. True, the Russian businessman may be expecting the would-be client to come back with a price 20% or 30% lower and thus haggle it out, but it simply will never get to this point. Why?
Because even if the Westerner is not outright turned off by the ridiculous price, when Westerners haggle over prices it is usually within the 5-10% range. So when the Western would-be client, puts in his logic formula of 5-10%, the price given by the Russian side, will still be way to high to bother with and thus Western monies will go to Indians, Chinese, Brazilians and others who all thank the Russian businessman for his pride, since this pride feeds their wallets.
Now, only because I am as generous as I am, I will impart one last bit of wisdom.
Suppose you have finally gotten the Western business as a client and it is time to raise prices, what now? Well, the typical Russian supplier method of dealing with Russian clients is something along the lines of a mugging. The supplier will announce some ridiculous price increase, back it with absolutely nothing, giving a relatively short period of time to negotiate or respond and then stop production. This is absolutely the surest way to drive away any and all existing Western clients. I have no idea how many times I have heard from one would be supplier or another that they had business with so and so company and that after a year (and the aforementioned price increase) they just left.
Read this part very carefully! When asking for a price increase, first of all, ask, do not demand. There is a point, of course that if you are absolutely ignored you may threaten and cut off the customer, but do not start off with the stick. Remember, this is a relationship not a bar fight. Second of all, do not ask for some ridiculous price increase in expectation of haggling. This is no different than the quote process and will have the same results. Furthermore, have all your explanations and justifications prepared and in an easy format and prepare to show your supplier receipts to back this up. Most importantly: DO NOT STOP PRODUCTION. This is the worst of the worst actions from the view of a Western business.
So, armed with this knowledge, it is my hope that Russian business will be able to go forth and actually compete effectively, to be able to show the quality of the work that rarely gets out past the pride of its businesspeople and yes, swallowing the pride will be the hardest part of all.
Stanislav Mishin
The article has been reprinted with the kind permission of Stanislav Mishin and cabe found on his blog Mat Rodina
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Putin sees larger international role for Shanghai security group
12:06 | 30/ 10/ 2008
ASTANA, October 30 (RIA Novosti) - Russia's PM Vladimir Putin urged the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) on Thursday to boost cooperation with observer countries and international organizations.
The prime ministers of Russia, China, and four Central Asian countries met on Wednesday for a two-day summit in Kazakhstan's capital to discuss measures to overcome the ongoing financial crisis.
"The first steps have been made in the past few months to involve observer nations into key SCO activities. This practice should continue," Putin said. Russia currently holds the rotating SCO presidency.
He also urged the group to develop its foreign contacts more actively and establish an emergency relief center within the organization.
The SCO, which is widely seen as a counterweight to NATO's influence in Eurasia, comprises Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. The group primarily addresses security issues, but has recently moved to embrace economic and energy projects.
Kazakh Prime Minister Karim Masimov suggested SCO finance ministers and central bank heads hold a meeting in the near future to discuss the situation "to minimize the risks and negative consequences" in the region amid the current financial crisis.
Masimov also proposed bringing together SCO agriculture ministers to discuss food supplies, export duties and other issues as part of a food security program.
The proposal was developed further by Kyrgyz Prime Minister Igor Chudnov, who suggested the organization draft a regional food security strategy.
Chinese government officials, businesses and banks are set to boost cooperation with SCO member-countries, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said.
The Chinese premier also urged action to minimize the impact of the global credit crunch on the region. He proposed facilitating trade and investment in the region and increasing transparency and coordination within the group to improve the regional business and investment climate.
According to Chinese statistics, China's trade within the SCO totaled $55.8 billion in the first eight months of 2008, up 35% year-on-year. The country expects to increase bilateral trade with SCO member countries to up to $100 billion this year.
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Russian international reserves down $31 bln in week
10:41 | 30/ 10/ 2008
MOSCOW, October 30 (RIA Novosti) - Russia's gold and foreign currency reserves dropped by $31 billion, to $484.7 billion, in the week of October 17 - October 24, the Central Bank of Russia said Thursday.
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By David Pilling
Published: October 29 2008 20:15 | Last updated: October 29 2008 20:15
We are used to the concept that when a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil all manner of unspeakable things happen in New Jersey and Tunbridge Wells. But many have struggled to understand the link between Mrs Watanabe’s mood swings and the price level of exotic currencies, distant equity markets and sundry commodities. What, in short, does a Japanese housewife have to do with the price of tea in China?
Mrs Watanabe is crude shorthand for Japan’s $15,000bn pool of savings, the deepest in the world and worth more than the annual economic output of the US. These vast resources are somewhat apocryphally marshalled by Japanese women, who have traditionally held a firm grip on family finances.
In fact, Mrs Watanabe is very crude shorthand indeed: she is just as likely to be Mr Watanabe, the manager of a Japanese life assurance company portfolio, or Mr Smith, an American hedge fund manager, borrowing in yen to buy South African rand, US mortgage-backed securities or tea futures. Whoever, she is, she borrowed cheaply in yen, courtesy of Japan’s rock-bottom interest rates – which have been stuck between zero and 0.5 per cent since 1999 – and put the money in higher-yielding assets abroad.
The important thing to know about Mrs Watanabe is that, temporarily at least, she has all but stopped flapping her wings. In the past days, as spectacular moves in global currencies reveal, the carry trade has been violently unwound. With last week’s panic retreat from risk assets of almost every description came a dramatic rise in the yen, partially reversed in the past two days on rumours of a Japanese interest rate cut. Even so, the yen was trading on Wednesday at about Y97 to the dollar, the other “safe haven” currency, against a remarkably steady Y110-Y120 in recent years.
The yen carry trade has not been the only cheap source of liquidity in recent years. But Ashraf Laidi, chief currency strategist at CMC Markets, reckons it has been the biggest. He quotes figures suggesting that Japanese households alone, discounting savings mediated through life assurers and other institutions, have mobilised $500bn in outbound funds. That leaves aside speculators, who have borrowed unknowable amounts of yen to invest abroad, often on highly leveraged terms.
Just as state bank bail-outs risk moral hazard, more recklessness and the need for future bail-outs, so the unwinding of the carry trade carries with it the danger of the next great bubble. In Japan, the central bank appears to have reacted to a rising yen and sinking stock market by contemplating the uncontemplatable: a rate cut. Even the rumour of such has provoked a mini equity rally and a weakening of the currency.
This is poison for the BoJ. It hated having to keep rates low, fearing that cheap money can cause bubbles in real estate, in capital investment and in the carry trade. Its sightings of inflationary danger everywhere provoked mirth among outside experts. But few are laughing now.
The BoJ might feel vindicated. Even so, it may have to do the opposite of what it wants by cutting rates to avoid the danger of sharp economic contraction. The risks are compounded by the renewed danger of deflation, a ghoulish presence for a decade that, thanks to sliding commodity prices, could come back to haunt Japan.
If Japan really is about to reverse course towards zero interest rates, it will once again become the source of almost free money for anyone with an appetite to invest. Worse even than that, says Mr Laidi, is the potential for an even more dangerous dollar carry trade. The Federal Reserve has been desperately cutting rates, and lopped another half point off again on Wednesday. The nearer US interest rates approach zero, the greater the incentive to move dollars into higher-yielding assets elsewhere.
These gyrations do nothing to solve the underlying problem, which is that Asia has an excess of savers and the US and Europe an excess of spenders. Unless that is solved, the world seems condemned to repeat the swings of recent years, as capital is arbitraged between countries where money is cheap to those where it is expensive.
Until recently, one of Mrs Watanabe’s favourite wheezes was to take her Japanese yen and put them in Australian dollars, earning her a roughly six-point interest rate gain. This week, she – and those who travel with her – will not have missed the fact that Iceland just raised its interest rate to 18 per cent. That is a 17.5 point differential with Japan, and counting. Krona, anyone?
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Mars ‘shocked’ by destruction of safe chocolates
By John Aglionby in Jakarta
Published: October 29 2008 19:22 | Last updated: October 29 2008 19:22
Mars said yesterday it was “shocked” that Indonesia had confiscated and destroyed thousands of cartons of its sweets because of melamine contamination fears even though tests had shown they were safe to eat.
Indonesia’s Food and Medicine Supervision Agency, BPOM, confirmed 2,000 cartons of Snickers and M&Ms had been destroyed but refused to explain why or comment on the case, which Mars said had cost it half the year’s predicted revenue.
The case highlights the challenges of investing in Indonesia, where officials sometimes appear to act arbitrarily.
Mars is one of several global food companies to have been caught up in China’s melamine-tainted dairy products scandal. More than 10,000 Chinese children have fallen ill this year, with at least four dying, after manufacturers put dangerously high levels of the poisonous chemical in milk powder and other foods.
The confectioner’s troubles began on September 27 when tests conducted by the Indonesian food and drugs regulator showed some Snickers bars and packets of M&Ms made with Chinese dairy products contained 24.44 and 856.3 parts per million of melamine respectively. The US Food and Drug Administration says 2.5ppm is the maximum allowed level.
The regulator’s results, which Khaled Rabbani, a regional director of Mars, said were “flawed”, contradicted Chinese government test results and, according to Mars, results from more than 400 tests worldwide which all ruled their products were safe.
On October 23, BPOM seized Mars’s confectionery. Three days later Mars and BPOM conducted joint tests on the seized sweets which, according to results seen by the Financial Times, detected no melamine in the Snickers and 0.03-0.05ppm of melamine in the M&Ms. On Tuesday BPOM wrote to Mars saying the sweets would be destroyed.
Mr Rabbani said: “We understand there are melamine issues in the region and that BPOM needs to send a strong message to the nation that the food supply is safe. But we were shocked that our products were destroyed.”
Mr Rabbani said the company remained committed to Indonesia in spite of the incident.
Husniah Thamrin, the head of BPOM, confirmed the sweets had been destroyed but declined to comment further.
Mars’ woes in Indonesia extend to the legal sector where two courts have ruled against it in a dispute with its former distributor. Mars has appealed to the supreme court.
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Moscow agrees oligarch bail-out
By Catherine Belton in Moscow
Published: October 29 2008 23:42 | Last updated: October 29 2008 23:42
Russia’s state development bank on Wednesday approved $10bn (£6bn, €8bn) in refinancing for the country’s cash-strapped oligarchs. This came as the first step of a $50bn government bail-out that could redraw Russia’s business landscape.
As part of the package, Oleg Deripaska’s UC Rusal holding company was set to receive a $4.5bn loan. It will use it to repay in full a syndicate of western banks, including Royal Bank of Scotland and Merrill Lynch, that Mr Deripaska has been scrambling to pay by a Friday deadline, people familiar with the situation said.
The approval of the government loan – to be disbursed in the next few weeks – would make it easier for Rusal to persuade the banks to agree an extension of the deadline until the end of November, these people said. “It looks like everything is slotting into place,” said one person close to the creditors.
Mr Deripaska, Russia’s richest man, has been racing to secure state refinancing for the loan after the value of the 25 per cent stake in Norilsk Nickel he pledged as collateral tumbled in breach of covenants. Earlier efforts to win refinancing from the western banks failed.
The Russian government is likely to exact a high price, however, for providing the lifeline to his empire.
The terms of the bail-out package were yet to be hammered out, one person close to the situation said.
However, government officials have said the state development bank, VEB, would demand the same stakes as collateral as those pledged to the western banks.
As a result, Mr Deripaska’s stake in Norilsk, the world’s biggest nickel miner, is likely to remain under pressure.
Some government factions are eyeing the creation of a state metals and mining champion and Mr Deripaska is already battling rival owner Vladimir Potanin for control of the company.
Rusal declined to comment on Wednesday, as did VEB, although it confirmed $10bn in loans had been approved.
Mikhail Fridman’s Alfa Group will also be a recipient of the first wave of state bail-out funds after his telecoms arm, Altimo, failed to meet margin calls last week on $2bn in loans from a syndicate of western banks led by Deutsche Bank.
People close to the creditors said Deutsche Bank had received a letter of credit from VEB on Tuesday.
This allowed the two sides to agree that the loans would be repaid in full.
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Syria Warns it May Close US Embassy
By VOA News
29 October 2008
The U.S. embassy in Syria's capital has issued a warning to Americans in the country to be alert following a raid on eastern Syria that Damascus blames on U.S. forces.
The embassy says "unforeseen events" could prompt officials to close the embassy to the public indefinitely.
Syria has protested to the United Nations about Sunday's deadly helicopter raid.
In a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon released Tuesday, Syria urged U.N. member states to prevent a repeat of the attack, calling it a serious violation of Syria's sovereignty.
Syria's letter also says the U.N. Security Council should take action against those responsible for the raid, saying it killed eight Syrian civilians, including children. The identity of the casualties has not been independently verified.
Syria's government ordered the closure of an American school and a U.S. cultural center in Damascus on Tuesday in apparent retaliation for the helicopter assault.
The Bush administration has refused to confirm or deny carrying out the attack.
But, U.S. officials, speaking anonymously, say the operation appears to have killed al-Qaida leader Abu Ghadiyah who smuggled weapons and foreign fighters into Iraq.
Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh criticized the attack Tuesday, saying his country "rejects" the operation and does not want its territory to be used for attacks on neighboring countries.
Al-Dabbagh also called on Damascus to crack down on insurgents who use Syria as a base to train and launch attacks on Iraq. Baghdad has said that Sunday's helicopter raid targeted such an area.
Syria expressed apparent displeasure with Iraq's reaction, postponing a meeting of Syrian and Iraqi officials planned for November in Baghdad.
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Belarus to liberalise for IMF loan
By Jan Cienski in Minsk
Published: October 29 2008 09:26 | Last updated: October 29 2008 18:53
Belarus is promising to reform its economy and sell off some state assets as it holds talks with the International Monetary Fund on a possible $2bn loan as a “security cushion” in case of further turbulence from the global financial crisis.
Minsk has used about 10 per cent of its foreign currency reserves, which now stand at about $4.9bn, over the last month as it tried to support the Belarusian rouble.
Belarus, which has a relatively underdeveloped financial sector, was not affected by the initial shock of the crisis, but it has been hit by turmoil in Russia, its main trading partner, and neighbouring Ukraine.
“In the first phase Belarus was only minimally affected. But in the second phase, with terms of trade becoming worse, we anticipate certain problems will confront our exporters,” Vasily Matyushevsky, the deputy chairman of the central bank, told reporters on Wednesday.
The IMF has already agreed to loan Hungary $25.1bn and Ukraine $16.5bn. An IMF delegation arrived in Minsk on Sunday and is holding talks with the Belarusian government.
“It is needed to safeguard against any shocks or stresses,” said Andrei Kobyakov, the deputy prime minister, adding that if the economic situation improved Belarus might end up not needing the loan.
Belarus, one of Europe’s last authoritarian states, has long been one of Russia’s closest allies but in the last year has been cautiously opening itself to the west. In September it increased the permitted foreign stake in local banks to rise from 25 to 50 per cent. The government is also planning to sell off four state owned banks as well as other state owned enterprises.
“We are taking steps to improve the business climate of our country, to ensure a continued inflow of foreign direct investment,” said Mr Matyushevsky.
Belarus is also in the final stages of negotiating a $2bn loan from Russia, which supplies Belarus with most of its oil and gas. Mr Kobyakov denied that the terms of the loan were tied to Belarusian recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two breakaway regions of Georgia that Russia says are independent states.
“The Russian loan is not linked to the global economic crisis, although in today’s situation it is coming just in time,” he said.
The Belarusian economy grew by 8.2 per cent last year and the government expects growth this year to be at least 10 per cent.
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Case lays Abramovich’s interests bare
By Megan Murphy, Law Courts Correspondent
Published: October 30 2008 02:45 | Last updated: October 30 2008 02:45
The luxurious lifestyle and labyrinthine business holdings of Roman Abramovich, the billionaire Russian owner of Chelsea Football Club, were on Wednesday laid bare in a potentially landmark ruling over a Siberian oil dispute.
In the latest of a series of English cases to delve into the historically opaque dealings of the oligarchs, Mr Abramovich successfully defended efforts to sue him in London for allegedly defrauding a bankrupt Russian oil company out of billions of dollars.
Rather unusually, the 134-page ruling details everything from the business magnate’s vast property holdings, to the exact amount of days he has spent in the UK over the past seven years.
Even for an oligarch, Mr Ambramovich appears wedded to a hectic schedule.
Spending time at his myriad of chartered yachts, his “seven or eight” flats in Knightsbridge, London, his ski chalets in Colorado, the €230m ($303m, £183m) chateau in France and his three homes in Russia, means that Mr Abramovich boards an aircraft between 10 and 15 times a month.
Much more importantly for his fellow oligarchs, however, was Mr Justice Christopher Clarke’s ruling that Mr Abramovich was primarily resident in Russia at the time the suit was filed, in spite of his substantial interests in the UK.
It emerged that a “very large” percentage of his visits to England – as much as 92 per cent in any given year – were specifically connected with Chelsea matches, rather than any personal or professional ties.
The football club, bought by Mr Abramovich in 2003 and on which he has lavished around £500m, was described as a “hobby and a leisure interest” by Mr Justice Clarke in his lengthy judgment.
“It is not a business investment,” the judge said. “The sums that Mr Abramovich has given to the club far exceed any return that could possibly be expected.”
Legal experts said the decision may help other international business titans fend off attempts to sue them in the UK if they spend most of their time in other countries.
Adrian Lifely, a lawyer at law firm Osborne Clarke, said it would “close the door” on an anticipated flood of claims targeting oligarchs and wealthy foreigners who own property in London.
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Congo reignites
Published: October 30 2008 02:00 | Last updated: October 30 2008 02:00
The war that has claimed more victims than any other since world war two is reigniting at potentially horrific cost. Several million Congolese died before international efforts to broker peace began to bear fruit in 2003. The United Nations' largest peacekeeping force has since prevented a legacy of localised conflicts regaining nationwide momentum, although atrocities have continued on a monstrous scale. This time, however, the pattern of fighting, and of bellicose statements emanating from neighbouring capitals, bears alarming similarities to events that led in the past to a devastating regional war.
Ethnic Tutsi rebels allied to neighbouring Rwanda are poised to capture the eastern city of Goma, where UN forces have their principal base. More than a million displaced villagers risk being cut off from aid. Congolese government troops are on the run and Kinshasa is appealing to Angola to intervene on its behalf. History is repeating itself. Britain and America - as Rwanda's principal western allies - risk playing a proxy role in a possible bloodbath and collapse of the UN mission if they fail to use their leverage.
A conflagration is inevitable if Rwanda becomes more explicitly involved. The Rwandan government denies supporting renegade commander and alleged war criminal Laurent Nkunda, who is threatening to take his battle to Kinshasa, 1,500km away. But if Kigali has not already contrived to make his latest offensive possible, it is intervening on his behalf now, exchanging fire with Congolese troops.
The Kinshasa government is far from saintly itself. It holds part of the blame for the collapse of a ceasefire accord signed last year. The UN mission has proved only partially effective. A policy of containment has cooled tensions but left causes unaddressed. Among these is the continued presence in eastern Congo of Hutu militias, bearing the same philosophy that fuelled the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Few analysts believe they pose a significant threat to Rwanda now. But they provide a pretext for General Nkunda to maintain a standing army to protect the business interests of wealthy minority Tutsis.
Speaking about Russia in Georgia, David Miliband, Britain's foreign secretary, said this week that whatever the rights or wrongs, they did not justify one country invading another. Britain is Rwanda's largest bilateral donor. The US is a key ally too. Together they have influence in Central Africa, which they did not have in the Caucasus, to prevent Rwanda crossing Congo's border and to force it to restrain Gen Nkunda.
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The Short View: Markets get what they want
By John Authers
Published: October 29 2008 18:48 | Last updated: October 29 2008 18:48
Markets have got what they wanted. Ahead of Wednesday’s monetary policy meeting of the Federal Reserve, Fed Funds futures indicated certainty that the target Fed Funds rate would drop from 1.5 to 1 per cent. The only doubt was whether the Fed would signal continuing concern about inflation; and it chose to flag only risks to growth.
For the sake of the stock markets, it is just as well that the Fed came through with a half-point cut. European stocks had just completed a 24-hour surge that had started in the US and Asia. That move undid falls of the previous week and was correlated with a move back out of the yen and dollar and into other currencies.
The cumulative effect of these moves shows that world markets still lack a clear compass. The UK’s FTSE-100 closed 21.8 per cent higher, in dollar terms, than its mid-session low on Monday. A disappointment from the Fed might have been hard to handle.
This latest market spasm is not all about central banks. Last week’s sell-off of all currencies against the yen and the dollar was driven by “deleveraging” as hedge funds strove to pay off debts (often in yen), exit risky trades and bring money home to the US. Tuesday’s sudden reversal may indicate that that forced selling is ending.
Yet it also appears to reflect a bet that the forex markets had left both the Fed and the Bank of Japan with no choice but to cut rates. The dollar had gained almost 16 per cent against a trade-weighted index of currencies, in barely a month. Meanwhile the yen gained 18 per cent against the dollar and 33 per cent against the euro in a matter of weeks.
If the market can get through the week without accident, the chances for the long-awaited rally look good. The next event is the BoJ’s meeting on Friday. According to Credit Suisse, the chance that it cuts rates has this week risen from 15 per cent to 55 per cent.
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Bank of China books 3.8 billion dollars in investment losses
AFP
Bank of China said it had posted 26.3 billion yuan (3.8 billion dollars) in potential losses on assets at the end of September, partially related to US subprime mortgage-backed securities.
China's largest foreign exchange bank also reported a net profit of 17.8 billion yuan in the third quarter, up 11.5 percent from a year earlier, according to a filing with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange late Wednesday.
The potential losses on assets for the first nine months of the year more than doubled from 10.8 billion yuan a year earlier due to new paper losses on loans and foreign currency investment securities, the bank said.
Bank of China (BoC) said it held US subprime mortgage-related debt securities valued at 3.3 billion dollars at the end of September. The loss on paper was 2.0 billion dollars on those securities.
The bank said it also owned 6.2 billion dollars in debt securities issued by troubled US mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
In addition, it held 1.4 billion dollars of securities backed by Alt-A mortgage, a category of loans with credit risks between prime and subprime loans.
The bank added it had booked a 65 million-dollar charge for the holdings of 76 million dollars worth of bonds issued by collapsed US investment bank Lehman Brothers.
It also faced a 45 million-dollar charge for 53 million dollars in loans its New York branch had extended to Lehman and its units.
Although the exposure accounted for only a small portion of its total assets of 962.8 dollars, analysts said BoC faces a more challenging environment compared to other Chinese banks due to its bigger foreign exchange securities portfolio and overseas operations.
Meanwhile, earnings growth in the third quarter slowed from the first half when its net profit grew 42.8 percent from a year earlier as bank profits were hurt by a slowing domestic economy and falling interest rates.
China's economic growth weakened to nine percent in the third quarter, the slowest in about five years. The central People's Bank of China cut key interest rates on Wednesday in a bid to spur economic growth, the third such move in six weeks.
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Britain's Brown in Gulf to seek world bailout plan support
AFP Katherine Haddon
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown embarks on a mini-tour of oil-rich Gulf states Saturday, but could struggle to win support for his plan to boost funds available to nations hit by global economic chaos.
Brown will head to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar in a four-day visit and is likely argue to that Gulf states should be among the biggest donors to an expanded International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout scheme.
"It's the countries that have got substantial reserves, the oil-rich countries and others who are going to be the biggest contributors to this fund," Brown said before the trip, adding he also wanted China to contribute.
"I am going to the Gulf at the weekend and it is one of the items that will be in the discussions with all the international leaders."
But the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), whose top producer is Saudi Arabia and which counts the UAE and Qatar as members, says it sees no reason its members should bail out a crisis which originated in the US.
And experts say that even if Gulf states do step in to bail out countries hit by the downturn, they would probably not want to do it through the IMF .
Adam Dixon of consulting firm Oxford Analytica said they might prefer a "piggyback strategy" where they top up funds for countries like Pakistan from the IMF, which they see as dominated by the US and G7 countries.
"In terms of funneling it (the money) through the IMF, I don't think so," he told AFP.
The IMF, which has or is about to bail out Hungary, Ukraine and Iceland, currently has a 250 billion dollar bail-out fund, but Brown wants this extended to stop economic "contagion" spreading to other countries.
His trip to the Gulf comes ahead of a meeting of G20 leaders in Washington including Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah on November 15 which will likely discuss a restructuring of the world financial system, including the IMF.
The Gulf states, whose main economic driver is oil, have been hit by its price dropping below 60 dollars a barrel this week from record highs of nearly 150 dollars in July on fears of falling demand because of the slowdown.
Brown drew the ire of OPEC and Gulf leaders for speaking against OPEC's decision at an emergency meeting last week to cut oil output by 1.5 million barrels a day from November in a bid to buoy up prices.
Dixon said that, although most Gulf states were still flushed with cash, they would probably use the falls in oil prices as "the excuse" if they did not want to back Brown's plan.
OPEC's Secretary General Abdalla Salem El-Badri said Tuesday it was "surprising" that OPEC countries, which produce around 40 percent of the world's crude, were being asked to "bail out" the economic crisis.
"This crisis created in the (United) States must be solved within the States," he told an oil conference in London. Later he said he would not rule out another oil production cut.
Qatar's energy minister and deputy premier Abdulla bin Hamad al-Attiyah added at the same event that Britain and the US should not criticise the output cut without suggesting how more people could be encouraged to buy oil.
"You can't say to me 'don't do it, you're the bad boy' but with no solution," he said.
Meanwhile, UAE Energy Minister Mohamed Bin Dhaen Al Hamli said low oil prices were "very dangerous" for the world economy, adding that a "reasonable" price was needed to ensure continued investment.
As well as fears about how high oil prices could hit the global economy, Brown is facing pressure at home to reduce household fuel and petrol bills as householders face a likely recession in Britain.
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French billionaire to launch Polish bank
Yesterday, 06:24 pm
AFP
* Print Story
The Carlo Tassara investment group owned by French billionaire Romain Zaleski will launch a new bank in Poland next month backed with an investment of 450 million euros (562 million dollars), Alior Bank said Wednesday.
Alior said it would formally begin business on November 17, starting with 80 branches and aiming to have 200 by 2012 as an initial staff of 1,300 rises to 3,300.
It said it was targeting a two percent share of the retail banking market and four percent for business clients by 2012.
Bank officials said that now is a good time to launch, with the global financial crisis no obstacle.
"I would say, paradoxically, that this is a good time to open a new bank. The prospects of a recession are quite low," Alior head Wojciech Sobieraj told a news conference.
"Being new on the market is also an advantage. We don't have toxic debt or loans with low margins that have to be dealt with for years," she said.
Sobieraj, a high-profile local banker, got the idea two years ago and eventually won Zaleski's backing.
"We were considering investing in the banking sector and we liked Wojciech Sobieraj's project," said Zaleski's daughter, Helene Zaleski, a senior executive at Carlo Tassara and now a member of the Alior supervisory board.
Zaleski, whose parents were from Poland, made his fortune in steel and energy in France and Italy.
Carlo Tassara now holds major shares of French groups EDF and Vinci, and Italy's Intesa Sanpaolo, Edison and Generali.
The move to set up an ultra-modern banking operation, targeting a well-educated urban clientele, took one year to bear fruit, said Helene Zaleski.
Among the bank's hallmarks will be a service that is as paper-free as possible, with touch-screen signatures and mobile telephone text message transaction confirmations, as well as a weekly Internet chat between the board and customers.
When the serious planning began in September 2007, few expected the US real estate crisis to spill over into the global financial markets.
Even in the current climate, Alior seems unfazed.
Helene Zaleski pointed to the banking potential of Poland, a market she knows well after having worked in its insurance sector in the 1990s.
"There's still room for a large bank in Poland," she said.
"There are far fewer branches per head than in western Europe and much less liquidity deposited in banks here," she said.
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Blanchflower Says U.K. Needs Rate Cuts as Deflation Risk Looms
By Brian Swint and Jennifer Ryan
Oct. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Bank of England policy maker David Blanchflower said U.K. interest rates need to fall soon and ``significantly'' to stave off the threat of deflation as the economy endures a recession throughout the next year.
``Interest rates do need to come down significantly -- and quickly,'' Blanchflower said in a speech at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England, yesterday. ``If rates are not cut aggressively we do face the prospect of a relatively deep and long-lasting recession.''
The Federal Reserve cut its interest rate to 1 percent yesterday and said that downside risks to economic growth remain. Blanchflower has argued that the U.K. economy faces similar conditions to the U.S. and voted for a rate cut at every meeting in the past year, pressing for a half-point reduction to 4.5 percent before the Bank of England delivered it this month.
``U.K. output will continue to contract in 2008 and 2009,'' Blanchflower said. ``My concern is that inflation will be below 1 percent -- and maybe even negative.''
Inflation accelerated to 5.2 percent in September, the fastest pace in at least 11 years. The bank predicts it will soon start to slow toward the 2 percent target.
The Monetary Policy Committee voted unanimously to lower the interest rate on Oct. 8 after the financial crisis crippled the British banking industry. It will cut the rate by a further half point at the next scheduled meeting on Nov. 6, according to the median forecast of 30 economists in a Bloomberg News survey.
Darling's Pledge
The crisis has forced Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling to buy stakes in banks, raising spending. He signaled late yesterday that the Treasury will pay down debt once the economy recovers. The European Investment Bank will lend 4 billion pounds ($6.6 billion) to U.K. companies struggling to borrow because of the credit crunch, the Treasury said today.
Monetary policy has so far not been ``sufficiently forward looking'' and it has been ``apparent for some time'' that the U.K. is in a recession, Blanchflower said.
While other policy makers have argued that accelerating inflation will encourage Britons to push for higher wages, Blanchflower said that price expectations will fall. ``The British people are smart enough to have actually noticed that inflation is coming down fast,'' he said.
The pound's depreciation won't be inflationary because it will be offset by the more than 50 percent drop in oil prices since then, Blanchflower said. Companies would also have trouble passing on any higher costs as demand weakens, he said.
Job Losses
Jobless claims rose to the highest level in almost two years in September, the statistics office reported Oct. 15. The U.K. economy shrank 0.5 percent in the third quarter, the largest contraction since 1990.
Blanchflower said that happened before the global financial crisis flared up, following the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in September. The intensification of the credit squeeze that followed ``has yet to be fully felt'' by companies and households, he said.
The current financial crisis may turn out to be ``more significant'' than the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash, Blanchflower said. Still, ``it is a mistake to be overly gloomy'' because ``Britain's economy will, eventually, recover,'' he said.
In questioning after his speech, Blanchflower said that policy makers need to guard against ``systemic failure'' of the banking system. ``We're not out of the woods yet,'' he said.
Policy makers may need to reconsider how to cope with rising asset prices while consumer-price inflation remains subdued, Blanchflower said in his speech.
``The key economic policy over the last decade has been the unsustainable rise in asset and equity prices and the associated credit boom,'' Blanchflower said. ``Does mainstream theory have an adequate explanation of why things have gone so badly wrong? It is not clear that it does. It may well be time for a rethink.''
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Barclays' Leveraged Loan Sale Falters, Wall Street Journal Says
By Patricia Kuo
Oct. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Barclays Plc sold about 30 percent of the $970 million of mainly leveraged loans it is selling to wind up a derivatives agreement with hedge fund Black Diamond Capital Management LLC, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The small percentage of assets sold suggests bidders want too much of a bargain for the assets as the volume of leveraged loans for sale soars, the newspaper said, without saying where it got the information.
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Mizuho $7 Billion Loss Turned on Toxic Aardvark Made in America
By Finbarr Flynn
More Photos/Details
Oct. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Alexander Rekeda, a 34-year-old Ukrainian-born math whiz, turned in his BlackBerry and security card and sent an e-mail to his bosses at Calyon, the investment- banking unit of Credit Agricole SA. Then, along with ten colleagues from the New York structured-finance team, who fired off similar messages, he walked two blocks down the Avenue of the Americas to Mizuho Financial Group Inc.
It was Dec. 8, 2006, and Rekeda's arrival was a coup for Mizuho, Japan's second-largest bank by revenue. A month earlier, it became the first Japanese lender to list on the New York Stock Exchange since 1989 -- a move hailed by John Thain, then chief executive officer of the bourse, as a sign that Mizuho was taking ``its place among the world's leading companies.''
The hires would prove a costly blunder. Rekeda, who became head of structured credit in the Americas, and his team led Mizuho into a business it knew little about, securities backed by U.S. subprime mortgages, where it lost 672 billion yen ($7.1 billion), more than any bank in Asia. Most of the losses were related to defaults on collateralized debt obligations.
Mizuho expects as much as 20 billion yen in potential further losses on bonds and bad loans related to bankrupt Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., company spokeswoman Masako Shiono said on Sept. 16. Moody's Investors Service, citing ``questions regarding the effectiveness of Mizuho's risk management and its risk appetite,'' continues to give the bank a negative outlook.
``Mizuho never made a penny out of subprime in the good times, they just got left holding the can in the bad,'' says David Threadgold, an analyst at Fox-Pitt Kelton Asia Ltd. in Tokyo who has an ``underperform'' rating on the stock. ``They made a very poor decision to launch into the packaging of subprime products at the end of 2006.''
Toxic Assets
How a Japanese bank that traces its roots to 1864 made such a bold entry into the U.S. subprime securities market, and almost choked on the toxic assets it created, is a tale of overreaching and poor timing. It also illustrates how financial technology made in the U.S. wreaked havoc on the other side of the globe.
Many of the details are spelled out in a lawsuit Calyon filed against Mizuho in U.S. federal court seeking $750 million for ``covertly'' inducing its employees to quit. The case was settled out of court in September 2007 for an undisclosed amount. Shiono said Mizuho wouldn't comment for this article.
Rekeda, who has a master's degree in mathematics from Kiev State University of Economics in Ukraine and an MBA from the University of Connecticut, had built Calyon's CDO business over two years. He closed six deals for the French bank in 2006, according to an affidavit in the case.
Signing-On Fee
All six, including two with the celestial names Cetus and Orion, later defaulted as Paris-based Credit Agricole racked up more than 6.5 billion euros ($8.1 billion) in subprime losses. Rekeda, now 34, declined to be interviewed.
On Oct. 18, 2006, Rekeda and his team were offered an $11 million signing-on fee to defect to the Japanese bank, a Calyon lawyer said at a court hearing. Mizuho's plan to expand into the U.S. was hatched earlier that year, as Japanese lenders were recovering from a 14-year debt crisis that forced them to take $1.1 trillion in writedowns for bad loans.
Mizuho, formed in 2000 in a merger of three banks, beat out rivals Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc. to win approval from U.S. regulators to set up a financial holding company. That enabled it to operate as a full-service investment bank.
As Mizuho President Terunobu Maeda said at a press briefing on May 15 this year, the bank had excess capital and ``needed to study'' the U.S. mortgage-backed securities business.
Bad Loans
Maeda, 63, a former chairman of the Japanese Bankers Association and an amateur gardener who doesn't use air conditioners at his home during Tokyo's humid summers to make an environmental point, became president of Mizuho in April 2002. The bank recorded a loss of 2.38 trillion yen that fiscal year as it wrote off bad loans accrued during three recessions in a decade. Maeda returned it to profitability the next year after reducing non-performing assets and through gains on investments in Japanese stocks.
While Mizuho was a newcomer to the CDO market in the U.S., it had experience arranging and selling similar investments in Japan and Europe. The company had ramped up its loan- securitization business, which Japanese banks were able to do without borrowers' consent after October 1998. Merrill Lynch & Co., Bear Stearns Cos. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. all helped Japanese banks repackage and market securities backed by corporate loans and mortgages.
Rising Delinquencies
Even so, Mizuho decided it needed help in the U.S. Talks with the Calyon team began in early 2006, when Douglas Munson, a sales director for the French bank, approached golfing buddy Theodore Ake, head of fixed income for Mizuho in New York, according to two people familiar with the negotiations. The size of the group and the amount of sign-on bonuses snowballed after Rekeda was brought into the discussion, the people said. Munson and Ake declined to comment.
By the time the deal was consummated, the market was turning. On Dec. 11, 2006, the same day Mizuho announced it was setting up an office in the U.S. to create asset-backed debt securities, Fitch Ratings said the outlook for U.S. subprime mortgage bonds was ``negative.'' It expected delinquencies on those loans to rise by 50 percent.
There was also confusion about the hiring deal. The Calyon team turned out to include more than the five people expected by Hitoshi Shimoyama, then deputy president of investment banking unit Mizuho Securities USA Inc., documents in the case allege.
``Mizuho did not even know the number or names of additional persons until shortly before they came,'' Shimoyama said in a March 17, 2007, affidavit.
Bonus Pool
Benjamin Lee, one of those who defected on Dec. 8, returned to the French bank five days later. He said he ``had been misled by Rekeda'' about the terms of employment at Mizuho, according to an affidavit he filed.
Lee said he was initially told by Rekeda that he could expect $1 million to $1.5 million from a bonus pool. He later learned there was a separate contract for him and other junior members of the group that didn't include a revenue-related bonus. Senior team members were entitled to share as much as 25 percent of revenue from completed transactions, court documents said.
Rekeda's group priced its first deal within 10 weeks, after the Mortgage Bankers Association reported that the default rate on U.S. subprime loans reached 12.6 percent, the highest level since the first quarter of 2003.
Aardvark CDO
The deal was named after a squat animal with a pig-like snout that feeds on ants and termites. Incorporated as a special- purpose company in the Cayman Islands, Aardvark ABS CDO was an ugly concoction: 31 percent of its $1.5 billion of securities were backed by subprime loans, 23 percent by residential mortgages repackaged from other CDO deals, and 33 percent by Alt- A mortgages, a category just above subprime. The remaining 13 percent were prime loans.
One reason Rekeda was able to move so fast was that the deal had already been assembled by London-based Lloyds TSB Group Plc, which pulled out before completion, said three people familiar with the transaction. HarbourView Asset Management Corp., a unit of New York-based OppenheimerFunds Inc., stayed on as manager. Spokesmen for Lloyds and HarbourView declined to comment.
Moody's assigned its highest short-term rating of P-1 to $1.3 billion of the Aardvark securities. In the prospectus, Mizuho pledged to back 87 percent of the deal, meaning that the bank, rather than investors, was on the hook for most of the potential losses.
In the Pipeline
A subsequent Mizuho offering, Tigris CDO 2007-1, valued at $902 million in March 2007, was backed by the lowest investment- grade tranches of CDO deals arranged by other Wall Street firms, including Merrill, Lehman and Citigroup Inc., according to a report that month by Fitch Ratings. More than 80 percent of the securities in the CDO had Fitch's lowest investment rating, BBB-, which is nine grades below AAA.
Rekeda planned to bring at least nine more CDO deals to market within six months, the investment newsletter Asset-Backed Alert reported on May 11, 2007. The newsletter quoted him saying the bank had ``built up the pipeline.'' As of April 1, 2007, Mizuho Securities had amassed more than 550 billion yen in residential mortgage-backed securities and CDOs supported by home loans, according to the bank's financial statements.
One of those deals made it to market in June 2007: a special-purpose entity called Delphinus 2007-1. Although named after a constellation, its contents were hardly stellar. Three- quarters of its securities were based on subprime mortgages, according to a July 23 Fitch report.
Ratings Downgrade
About 80 percent of the deal was backed by credit-default swaps arranged by firms including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup and Wells Fargo & Co. Citing ``strong demand'' from investors, Mizuho increased the size of the deal that July to $1.6 billion from $1.2 billion.
That was eight days before two Bear Stearns funds were shut down, heralding the start of the subprime crisis. Less than three months later, on Sept. 27, Fitch put Delphinus on its watch list. The negative designation, Fitch analyst Kevin Kendra said at the time, was ``probably the quickest I've seen'' on a CDO. In other words, Mizuho struggled to find buyers for its CDOs and, as their values plummeted, the bank would have to absorb the loss.
Mizuho didn't tell investors about the extent of its exposure until November 2007, when it reported a 70 billion-yen loss on subprime-related securities in the first half ended Sept. 30. It also said it expected that figure to grow to 170 billion yen for the full year.
CDO Default
By December, Mizuho had halted its U.S. CDO business. It fired Rekeda and at least four others on the team, putting an end to the bank's one-year experiment with American financial technology.
In January, as delinquencies on loans that backed Mizuho's CDOs increased, Aardvark, Tigris and Delphinus went into default. Subsequent downgrades of all of the tranches of Tigris and Aardvark required the bank to write down the value of the CDOs.
Mizuho had to inject 150 billion yen of capital into its securities unit, shelve a planned merger with Shinko Securities Co. and axe 300 jobs. The bank's shares lost half their value in the fiscal year ended March 31.
When a record 2,474 shareholders gathered at the Tokyo International Forum on June 26 for the bank's annual meeting, they were out for blood.
``The responsibility rests at the top with Maeda,'' Kenjiro Endo, 66, who bought Mizuho shares when he retired from chipmaker Toshiba Corp. six years ago, said after the meeting. ``If this were overseas, he'd resign.''
`Market Crashed'
Endo may have had a point. Citigroup CEO Charles O. ``Chuck'' Prince, Merrill's Stan O'Neal and Wachovia Corp.'s Kennedy Thompson were all forced to resign after significant subprime losses. In Japan, where executives often bow and apologize for their mistakes, Mizuho's Maeda stood firm.
``Unfortunately, from October, the securitized investment- product market crashed, and even if we tried to sell the investments, it wasn't possible,'' Maeda said at the shareholders' meeting. ``When the market stops functioning, there is no measure to avoid it.''
Maeda also defended the bank's decision to enter the U.S. securities market.
``It's not because of some management failure that things turned out like this,'' he said. ``I am very sorry to tell you, doing nothing, and not taking risk, is not a bank.''
Failure to Hedge
Yet Mizuho might have incurred half as many losses if it had accelerated the sale of subprime-related investments and hedged more bets with credit-default swaps, according to a person familiar with its U.S. operations. The bank, fearing it would lose as much as two-thirds of its potential profit, decided not to hedge, the person said. Mizuho declined to comment.
``The holding company was unable to grasp the size of losses at Mizuho Securities when the subprime problem emerged,'' said Keisuke Moriyama, a Tokyo-based analyst at Nomura Holdings Inc. ``Mizuho has a governance problem. How it fixes it is the biggest issue that faces the group.''
The ultimate cost to Mizuho may be greater than the 672 billion yen it wrote down. The bank, the first in Japan to put money in U.S. financials amid the credit crunch, invested $1.2 billion in Merrill in January. The Wall Street bank's shares have slumped 70 percent this year.
`Missed Out'
Now Mizuho is sidelined as other Japanese banks swoop in to buy troubled U.S. assets. Nomura purchased some of Lehman's Asian and European businesses in September, and Mitsubishi UFJ, the nation's largest bank, acquired 21 percent of Morgan Stanley for $9 billion.
``Mizuho has totally missed out,'' said Amir Anvarzadeh, director of Japanese equity sales at KBC Financial Products in London. ``They've been very aggressive overseas, trying to grow this business organically, and some of those ambitions have come back to haunt them.''
Although it was the biggest loser, Mizuho wasn't the only Japanese bank that got hurt. In all, 672 domestic banks and credit cooperatives had 1.5 trillion yen in losses from overseas securitized products, the country's financial regulator reported Sept. 4.
Rekeda, meanwhile, has moved on. He now works for Guggenheim Capital Markets LLC in New York, along with Paolo Torti and Xavier Capdepon, who both followed him from Calyon to Mizuho. Their new jobs: selling distressed CDOs at a discount.
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Russo-Finnish-Chinese economic forum to open in Helsinki
30.10.2008, 03.26
HELSINKI, October 30 (Itar-Tass) - Energy, transport, timber industry and environment will be the key item on the agenda of a Russian-Finnish-Chinese economic forum. It’s opening in Helsinki on Thursday and will be attended by about 300 businessmen and politicians.
The Finnish Ministry organized the meeting for Employment and Economic Development, the Finnish Foreign Ministry, the Russian Ministry of Economic Development and the Chinese Ministry of Commerce.
A representative of the Russian commercial office in Finland told Itar-Tass that the forum’s aim was to expand and diversify trade, economic and innovative cooperation.
Government representatives of Finland, Russia and China will participate in plenary meetings. National experts will brief their colleagues on industrial strategies and vital projects in their countries during roundtable meetings. They will discuss the possibility of expanding cooperation in this sector of the economy.
The participants in the forum will visit several Finnish companies. The experts will present their views on the potential for future cooperation between the three countries at the last closing meeting.
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USA too naive to believe that its sanctions hurt Russia’s arms export
29.10.2008 Source: Pravda.Ru URL: http://english.pravda.ru/russia/politics/106636-usa_russia_sanctions-0
USA’s single-handed sanctions against Russia’s defense export giant, Rosoboronexport, is an attempt of unfair competition, although the sanctions will not hurt the activity of the Russian enterprise, President Dmitry Medvedev believes.
“I have already said before that we believe that such sanctions are visionless,” Medvedev said at a session of the defense cooperation committee Tuesday. “This is unfair competition, it is simply an attempt to cut off suppliers. However, this decision is practically non-sensitive for us, and those, who made the decision, must take this into their consideration,” Medvedev said. The president added that Russia’s backlogs of defense export orders enlarged considerably and was currently evaluated at over $30 billion, Interfax reports.
Medvedev reminded that Russia conducted defense cooperation with 81 countries of the world. Russia has been strengthening cooperation with many of its partners lately, for example, a framework agreement in the field of defense cooperation has been recently signed with Saudi Arabia.
Russia ’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said earlier that the USA’s single-handed sanctions against Rosoboronexport for its cooperation with Iran were absolutely unacceptable.
Dmitry Medvedev also said that Russia would pay serious attention to other countries’ efforts aimed to provide military support to the incumbent administration of Georgia.
“We know that several countries were supplying weapons to Georgia, pushing Saakashvili’s regime towards aggression. We are also aware of the fact that those countries plan to supply even more weapons to the regime,” Medvedev said Tuesday.
“Unfortunately, several of our close partners participated in the affair. We won’t forget it and we will obviously take it into our consideration in our practical policies. I would like everyone to know it,” the Russian leader said.
“We will continue our work to deliver weapons and military hardware to our partners with the only purpose of enhancing their defensive ability,” Medvedev said. He also continued with saying that many members of the international community do not stick to such an approach, which was proved during the armed conflict in the Caucasus in August of this year.
Russia ’s chief military attorney, Sergei Fridinsky, stated in September that the weapons and military hardware, which Georgia used in its aggression against South Ossetia, had been delivered from 14 different countries. He added that Georgia received most of its weapons from the United States and Ukraine.
Ukraine does not deny the sales of its weapons to Georgia, although Ukrainian officials emphasize that arms sales to Georgia were never prohibited. Spokespeople for the Ukrainian administration said that the weapons had been delivered to Georgia on a legal basis and prior to the start of the military conflict in S. Ossetia. Furthermore, Ukraine intends to continue its arms export to Georgia in accordance with previously concluded contracts.
Russia in its turn intends to develop military cooperation with members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization to create the joint missile defense system.
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Mr. Saakashvili, it is time to say goodbye
30.10.2008 Source: Pravda.Ru URL: http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/106641-saakashvili-0
The Fat Lady has sung, the BBC, mouth piece of the British Neocons, has declared that, yes, Georgia and Saakashvili in particular are guilty of the murder of civilians in South Ossetia. Of course, they quickly then backed it up by saying Russia was wrong in defending those civilians being butchered by the Georgians. After all, we would not want Russia and the Russian people to feel they were right, even when they were, now would we?
Anyways, moving right along, dear reader, we return to our useful fool, Saakashvili. Well, when one of the key propaganda organs of the Anglo-American Trotskyte Neocons declares you in the wrong and you are a petty dictator of a small nation and one, to boot, presently and from day one on the Neocon payroll, that can only mean one thing...you are done, yesterday's news, kaput.
To boot, the opposition now plans marches on the 7th of November, the day that Saakashvili sent his Anglo-American trained goons in to beat the opposition to the ground in 2007. Back then, the Anglo-American Trotskytes still cared about their puppet, so they made a few noises about his assault upon unarmed peaceful demonstrators and than quickly blamed the demonstrations on Russia, surely not on the corruption and autocracy of their favorite puppet. This year promises to be different.
Now that the puppet has been used to try to restart the Cold War and failed. Now that most of the sensible folks of Europe have told the Anglo-American Trotskytes to go pound sand and the evidence is mounting daily that Georgia is a rogue state in every definition of the word and the people will be rising up against the Soros paid, CIA/MI6 controlled puppet, the Anglo-Americans are moving to keep ahead of the situation. It is obvious that Saakashvili is useless, worse than useless now, so a new replacement must be picked, one picked by the Neocons before the Georgians manage to pick one themselves. Oh sure, just like the last 3 times, the pick will look like it came from the people but they are an easy bunch to fool.
But what about Saakashvili? Surely a man in his situation might turn to Russia for help, except for that whole little August war thing and Russia having declared him a war criminal. Can't go there. To Europe? No, to much of a liability. Azerbaijan and Turkey have both declared their worries about his fitness to rule so they are probably out. Surely not the Armenians, not after what he's done against his own Armenians. Ukraine might be an option, at least as long as Yushchenko, the withered Orange is still hanging on the branch, but that too might not be for long.
Gosh, few choices. Its times like these one checks his life insurance policy to make sure it is paid up, the West does not like loose ends.
Stanislav Mishin
The article has been reprinted with the kind permission of Stanislav Mishin and can be found on his blog Mat Rodina
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Why Russian business can not get Western clients
29.10.2008 Source: Pravda.Ru URL: http://english.pravda.ru/business/companies/106638-russian_business-0
Having spent quite some time working on developing Russian suppliers, being Russian myself and understanding Westerners and Western Business, please allow me to give the following treatise for advice.
While Russian quality and technical expertise are generally quite good to over all superior, it is the so called business office, the decision makers and their staffs, that doom Russian industry to under representation in the world of manufactured goods. Why?
The simple reason is psychological. Russian businessmen: 1. Do not understand the Western psychology in the least and 2. Have a generally higher self opinion of their own intelligence, wisdom and cleverness than evidence would uphold.
It is written in the Bible: “When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom”.
This, these businessmen, these heads of corporations, should contemplate first and then read on the rest of this treatise.
To begin with, this is not the Soviet Union, customers will not come to you and beg you to do their business. As silly as this notion may sound to many Westerners, this was the reality of the Soviet Union and is still the mindset of many older Russian businessmen. A corollary of this is: if I do not know you exist, I will not bring any business to you. Thus, and listen very carefully to this point, you must advertise. That is correct; you must invest money to get your name and your product out on the market.
Do not forget, this is a global market and there is absolutely nothing unique about Russia that would in and of itself, drive business to your Russian corporation. On expertise there is competition from the Germans, Italians, Koreans, Japanese and others. On price there is the rest of Eastern Europe, China and India. A simple example of this: the OTC (Offshore Technology Conference), the biggest oil and gas conference in the world, held yearly in Houston, Texas, USA. Of the 2,400+ companies that were represented there for the 2008 event, 3, that’s right, THREE were Russian. There were over thirty Chinese companies, along with various Chinese ministries and about as many Indian companies. Guess who will get more business?
Russian companies going to Russian expos is fine if you want to attract Russian business, it is all but pointless if you are trying to get foreigners to come trade their time and money for your goods or services.
Further, discard the notion that the Western Corporation is both rich and yet stupid or foolish. The only people who are rich and stupid are those who inherit their money, not those who earned it. Large international corporations do have fools amongst them, like any human organization, but they are not the majority but a small minority. Those of us who deal in international business, often know more about your business, from the financial side, than you do. So go ahead and drop the idea that you can hang spaghetti off of the inastrantsa (foreigner’s) ears.
Now on to the business. It is true, that most Western business initially does not run on relationships, quite the opposite, relationships are developed last, after business is already moving forward. This is of course the opposite of eastern (and thus Russian) companies. When foreigners send inquiries and even when they show up the first or sometimes the second, time, they are often ignored or given very little attention. Usually, this is will kill any chances of moving forward, period. Few Westerners will continue to push if this is the treatment their inquiries receive. Thus, when you get an inquiry, be it by email, phone call, fax or in person, it should always be treated as a chance to earn money, not an interruption of your day or your staff’s day. Do not wait till you get the second or third inquiry before taking it seriously, most of the time there will be no second or third inquiry.
Next, do not take two or three months to respond. In the West a standard response time is 1 to 2 weeks, that’s right: 5-10 business days. Indians may take a month, which is really stretching it. The average Russian time is two or more months. Again, there is nothing so special about your company that any Western businessman will stand around and wait for you to get them a quote, when you feel like it. If an RFQ (request for quotes, in other words, a bid) is run and nine out of ten companies return their quotes, by the time the Russian company gets around to sending their quote in, often time the decisions are already made and their work is simply deleted or filed away for later (if ever) review.
The business world does not wait.
Worst yet, the Russian business attitude is one of: if there is nothing to communicate I will not communicate. So while the slow as a snail quoting process is moving forward, the customer is absolutely in the dark. Often times inquiry emails or calls go unanswered. To a Western business, this is the same as telling them to go to Hell…and most will, in frustration, take their business elsewhere.
Now that we have finally submitted the quote, we get to the next point that usually kills any chance of business going forward 1. Pride and 2. Traditional haggling. Pride: the Russian businessman often thinks he is the smartest in the room (which may or may not be true) and that his opposite is a rich fool (rarely if ever true…this stereotype of foreigners has been around with us eastern Slavs for 1,200 years it’s time for it to die). Accept the fact that more than likely, the foreigner knows his business, knows what proper prices are. He has come to Russia to get 1. A high quality good for 2. A low price.
That is correct, Russia is a low cost country. With a work force that gets paid about 1/4th that of Western Europe. With steel that is 20% cheaper, energy that is 30-50% cheaper, taxes that are 30% cheaper, Western businesses come to Russia to save money and many leave very disappointed. Why? Because the greed and pride factors, along with a haggling culture, drive most initial quotes to be as high or higher than the Western industries. If I have a German supplier, why on earth would I go to Russia just to pay German or close to German prices? The answer is simple, the answer is one that Indian and Chinese businessmen understand and that Russian businessmen refuse to consider, the answer is: I would not. Especially when the German supplier often gives better service.
After having had to fight just to have a quote request taken seriously and than having to wait for months to get a quote, to get a quote that is so outrageous is simply too much for most Westerners. True, the Russian businessman may be expecting the would-be client to come back with a price 20% or 30% lower and thus haggle it out, but it simply will never get to this point. Why?
Because even if the Westerner is not outright turned off by the ridiculous price, when Westerners haggle over prices it is usually within the 5-10% range. So when the Western would-be client, puts in his logic formula of 5-10%, the price given by the Russian side, will still be way to high to bother with and thus Western monies will go to Indians, Chinese, Brazilians and others who all thank the Russian businessman for his pride, since this pride feeds their wallets.
Now, only because I am as generous as I am, I will impart one last bit of wisdom.
Suppose you have finally gotten the Western business as a client and it is time to raise prices, what now? Well, the typical Russian supplier method of dealing with Russian clients is something along the lines of a mugging. The supplier will announce some ridiculous price increase, back it with absolutely nothing, giving a relatively short period of time to negotiate or respond and then stop production. This is absolutely the surest way to drive away any and all existing Western clients. I have no idea how many times I have heard from one would be supplier or another that they had business with so and so company and that after a year (and the aforementioned price increase) they just left.
Read this part very carefully! When asking for a price increase, first of all, ask, do not demand. There is a point, of course that if you are absolutely ignored you may threaten and cut off the customer, but do not start off with the stick. Remember, this is a relationship not a bar fight. Second of all, do not ask for some ridiculous price increase in expectation of haggling. This is no different than the quote process and will have the same results. Furthermore, have all your explanations and justifications prepared and in an easy format and prepare to show your supplier receipts to back this up. Most importantly: DO NOT STOP PRODUCTION. This is the worst of the worst actions from the view of a Western business.
So, armed with this knowledge, it is my hope that Russian business will be able to go forth and actually compete effectively, to be able to show the quality of the work that rarely gets out past the pride of its businesspeople and yes, swallowing the pride will be the hardest part of all.
Stanislav Mishin
The article has been reprinted with the kind permission of Stanislav Mishin and cabe found on his blog Mat Rodina
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Putin sees larger international role for Shanghai security group
12:06 | 30/ 10/ 2008
ASTANA, October 30 (RIA Novosti) - Russia's PM Vladimir Putin urged the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) on Thursday to boost cooperation with observer countries and international organizations.
The prime ministers of Russia, China, and four Central Asian countries met on Wednesday for a two-day summit in Kazakhstan's capital to discuss measures to overcome the ongoing financial crisis.
"The first steps have been made in the past few months to involve observer nations into key SCO activities. This practice should continue," Putin said. Russia currently holds the rotating SCO presidency.
He also urged the group to develop its foreign contacts more actively and establish an emergency relief center within the organization.
The SCO, which is widely seen as a counterweight to NATO's influence in Eurasia, comprises Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. The group primarily addresses security issues, but has recently moved to embrace economic and energy projects.
Kazakh Prime Minister Karim Masimov suggested SCO finance ministers and central bank heads hold a meeting in the near future to discuss the situation "to minimize the risks and negative consequences" in the region amid the current financial crisis.
Masimov also proposed bringing together SCO agriculture ministers to discuss food supplies, export duties and other issues as part of a food security program.
The proposal was developed further by Kyrgyz Prime Minister Igor Chudnov, who suggested the organization draft a regional food security strategy.
Chinese government officials, businesses and banks are set to boost cooperation with SCO member-countries, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said.
The Chinese premier also urged action to minimize the impact of the global credit crunch on the region. He proposed facilitating trade and investment in the region and increasing transparency and coordination within the group to improve the regional business and investment climate.
According to Chinese statistics, China's trade within the SCO totaled $55.8 billion in the first eight months of 2008, up 35% year-on-year. The country expects to increase bilateral trade with SCO member countries to up to $100 billion this year.
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Russian international reserves down $31 bln in week
10:41 | 30/ 10/ 2008
MOSCOW, October 30 (RIA Novosti) - Russia's gold and foreign currency reserves dropped by $31 billion, to $484.7 billion, in the week of October 17 - October 24, the Central Bank of Russia said Thursday.
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