Despite pronouncements of consensus, US regulators may yet reject Basel II causing the US to take unilateral action thereby creating problems for banks elsewhere.

Extensive foreign control of bank assets in nearly all the new member states highlights the importance of information sharing.

The SIA’s Richard Thornburgh explains why clarity and clear regulatory regimes are good for business.

With the uncertainty surrounding the two-month long impeachment process of President Roh Moo Hyun now finally resolved, and the president firmly back in the saddle, South Korea is keen to push ahead with more financial reform and, in particular, focus on asset management.

Bank of China (BoC), the largest of China’s big four state-owned banks, has announced that its non-performing loans ratio will be down to around 5% by the end of 2004 as it plans to bring in a strategic investor later this year in preparation for its IPO. This significant reform of the bank’s ownership structure reflects the Chinese authorities’ determination to reform the big four banks which account for 55% of China’s bank assets.

German mortgage banks are campaigning to develop a common legal definition and standard for covered bonds. The dispute was sparked last year by three UK banks issuing covered bonds which do not legally qualify as this asset class.

India’s Congress Party will lead an alliance of political parties that will form the next government after it emerged the surprise victor in the country’s national elections in early May. Voters shunned the previous regime led by the Bharatiya Janata Party whose economic reforms appear to have left a large majority of rural Indians unmoved.
Manmohan Singh, the former finance minister, will be the new prime minister after Congress party president Sonia Gandhi turned the job down.

China is set to use medicine strong enough to cool down its investment fever, but not so potent as to bring the economy to a standstill. Banks are at the forefront of this austerity campaign, acting on the orders of the central government to choke off credit supply to overheated sectors.

The Ukrainian and Russian parliaments ratified an agreement, at the end of April, to create a free-trade Unified Economic Area (UEA). The pact, tying the two fast-growing economies more closely together, has forged the European Union of the east.

It’s time to embrace the multilateral policy challenge and recognise and enhance the IMF’s central role therein, says Mohamed A El-Erian.
Over its 60-year history, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has repeatedly adapted to changing global conditions. In maintaining an important role in the international economic system, it helped countries navigate the shift away from the Bretton Woods regime of fixed exchange rates in the 1970s; it sought to moderate the impact of the two oil shocks in 1973/74 and 1979/80; it helped solve the generalised 1980s debt crisis in Latin America; and it responded to the crisis that broke out in east Asia in 1997, spread to eastern Europe and risked engulfing Latin America.