Thursday 3 April 2008

Bank Of Finland preparing for a "Northen Rock"



It looks like day after day we get more worrying "rumours" or facts from the Icelandic banks.

"Finnish business daily Kauppalehti reported Thursday that the Bank of Finland might have to bail out Icelandic banks should they run into dire straits."

"According to the paper, Nordic central banks agreed four years ago to guarantee the stability of the region's banking system by bailing out banks that operated in at least two Nordic countries."

"The agreement was struck before any of the Icelandic banks operated in Finland. Credit rating agency Fitch recently downgraded Glitnir, Kaupthing and Landsbanki, all with operations in Finland."


Is nothern rocking? well when there are talks about bail out it's not a good sign for the nordic region as it is just a preparation for disturbing turbulences right at the doors... at the moment they are just banging, Erkki & co is still strong enough to hold the doors, but for how long??

So the Finnish tax payers might be have to participate into rescuing greedy, uncompetent icelandic bankers. I have no doubt that those CEO or investors that engineer this investment bubble have now their pocket full of money and have no worries wahtsoever if things collapse as they already backed their position... That's when Socialism come to the rescue of Capitalism : when things goes well the top rich get fattier and when things goes bad the lower income or the bottom 90% have to work hard to rescue the system....

We are witnessing the worst financial crisis that current and old generation has ever seen and yet the Finnish newpapers, web site , thinktank and bankers talk up the "Decoupling theory".
This theory state that although the US might fall into a recession, the rest of the world i.e emerging market, will be strong enough to keep intact the world economical growth.

The architecture of the current flawed financial platform is highly coupled, we have already seen it in action with German, English, Swiss banks making big losses.

It could be that this financial cirosis crisis is the worst ever simply because of the financial innovation and exotic product that were created thanks to advance in technology and mathematics. Today the same system is blowing up in all direction as it's so complex that nobody is able to predict how it's going to unfold or what is the cure of this uncurable disease...
I have already highlighted this issue last year with regard to deposit guarantee see link.


BREAKING NEWS:
Nordic central banks have no agreement to bail out banks in the region, Sweden's Riksbank said, rejecting suggestions that they may provide cash to Icelandic banks in the event of a financial crisis.
A memorandum of understanding between the central banks ``exists to allow the sharing of information, not to provide any lending facility,'' Mattias Persson, head of the financial stability department at Riksbank, said in a telephone interview from Stockholm today.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Hundreds of Sampo Bank clients considering changing banks", a bank run?

HousingFinland said...

No but it start that way if Sampo, i mean Dansk show signs of weakness then it will reinforce the people belief that they are better off going to another bank.

Technical problem + credit exposure + bad risk management + housing slump could quite easely trigger few banks failure...we haven't yet seen that in Europe but it's not a zero probability