banking system

The narrative of excess profits that recently sparked in public discussions in Lithuania was not accidental. Initially, business companies had been suspected of profiting from inflation. Then suspicions of undeserved profits hit banks. And here we are – digesting a proposal from the government to impose  a special windfall tax on banks.

The Credit holidays Act came into force in Poland. The work on it was accompanied by a surprising in recent years political unanimity. The bill was supported by 453 deputies and 98 senators.

Some people claim that the main reason why gold became money was that women liked it. Others claim that it is the faith that makes us use a certain good as money. By that logic, even water could become money just by virtue of us having faith in it.

The need for a CMU is clear; capital markets still remain shallow despite the European Union’s founding commitment to the free-flow of capital in the Treaty of Rome. If the green paper’s estimates are correct, 90 million additional euros would be available for business financing in the member-states if capital markets were as deep as the US.

The dramatic upsurge of CHF/PLN exchange rate in mid-January 2015 triggered in Poland a wave of discussion on the situation of people with mortgages in Swiss currency and who should be deemed responsible for such a state of affairs.

Iceland does not have much chance to go wrong. The current system is sufficiently large a disaster to require trying something else. They experienced capital controls, hyperinflation and there are financial crisis on average every 15 years. The currency suffers from chronic degradation. It would be nice to take a chance on an experiment in a country where the changes of a poorly performing financial system cannot be impeded by too powerful bankers and politicians.

We can find examples of negative interest rates in countries throughout history. But these are geographically or time-isolated cases. However, today we live in a world where more and more things are turning upside down. And one of such things is the fact that negative interest rates are shifting from a deviation to a norm (for the time being only within the financial system).

Except for few unfortunate ones, high schoolers have already finished their key exams. European banks have not.

On June 21, BNB announced that it will fulfill its mission at CCB within a month, by July 21. By then it promises that CCB will have either a new ownership structure or a strategic investor, or else be taken by the only state-owned Bulgarian Development Bank (BDB, with about 1% market share).

The key question is: why should the German regional states own a bank? It has cost and still costs the German taxpayer a great deal of money to invest in boats, planes and property, yet brings the taxpayer few advantages for the risks incurred. Given the strength of our economy, this poor performance still looks very strange.