Director of Country Strategy and Policy on the EBRD
Eastern Europe may need funds from the International Monetary Fund along with other international lenders to preempt a banking crisis along with a shortage of credit in the region’s economies as western banks pare assets.
The IMF, the eu Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the World Bank and the European Investment Bank, which spent $42 billion after the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holding Inc., should “stand ready to provide external assistance and financial support to banks,” the Vienna Initiative gang of regulators and policy makers said inside a statement after having a meeting inside the Austrian capital on Jan. 16. The risk of “excessive and disorderly deleveraging as well as a credit crunch” looms over the region, i was told that.
“There is definitely an strong impact out of this — a potentially strong impact,” EBRD’s Chief Economist Erik Berglof said in an interview within a Euromoney conference yesterday in Vienna. “You hold the headquarters making decisions on assets which are very small if you glance at the total balance sheet, but if you go through the subsidiaries in eastern Europe these are systemic inside countries where they operate.”
Regulators and policy makers are attempting to shield economic rise in eastern Europe against contagion from your euro area’s deepening debt crisis. New capital and liquidity requirements to the western lenders controlling three-quarters of eastern Europe’s banking system threaten to curb credit needed to fund the region’s companies and households.’Especially Virulent’
Deleveraging by european banks will make credit in eastern Europe scarcer, the globe Bank’s Andrew Burns was quoted as saying in Austrian newspaper Wiener Zeitung today.
“The dilemma is especially virulent in eastern Europe and central Asia because those countries strongly be determined by loans from civilized world,” Burns said.
A revival with the Vienna Initiative should be used concerning have to be a recognition that “there remains a coordination failure” between eastern and the european union to tackle banking risks, Piroska Nagy, director of country strategy and policy on the EBRD, said with the Vienna conference.
The IMF, EIB, EBRD and the World Bank “will engage in a heightened level with the region,” Nagy said today within an interview, without elaborating further.