According to Uralisib’s chief finance officer Konstantin Vaysman: “Russia’s crisis is the mirror image of the American one.” Mr Vaysman told a group of Russian bankers gathered in London for the annual Russian banking conference: “[The crisis in the US] started with toxic debt and then turned to a liquidity crisis; ours started with a liquidity crisis in September and now the toxic debt is going to come.”
Russia’s banking sector was walloped by the international financial crisis that hit in September 2008 after the fall of Lehman Brothers, but thanks to fast action by the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) and the deep pockets of the Russian state, it managed to avoid a systemic banking sector collapse.
