President Chávez: no more nationalisationsPresident Hugo Chávez has sought to allay investors' fears after the Venezuelan government took over Banco Federal. The president said he has no plans to take over more banks at this time and he urged people not to withdraw their deposits. The move follows a flurry of bank nationalisations and the creation of a new regulated foreign exchange market to stop the rapid depreciation of the bolivar and stem capital flight - thought to be about $24bn last year.
With the onset of the financial crisis, The Banker has focused much more of its Top 1000 data gathering on asset quality. This year, a total of 179 banks supplied comprehensive data on their levels of impaired assets, compared with 142 last year. While this still accounts for only 18% of total banks in the Top 1000, it is sufficient to begin to understand global trends in asset quality.
Despite pulling itself out of the worst recession the country has seen since the Second World War, Japan remains a deeply troubled economy saddled with a fiscal position that has in recent months gone from bad to worse: indeed, so parlous is Japan's predicament that in June the country's new prime minister, Naoto Kan, warned that the once mighty Asian economy may be staring a Greek-style public debt crisis in the face.