Plunging Oil Prices Create Bad-Loan Headache for Singapore Banks
DBS exposed to liquidation of oil-services firm Swiber Moody’s says energy lending is 5.3 percent of Singapore loans The plunge in oil prices is catching up with Singapore’s three largest banks. On Thursday, Swiber Holdings Ltd., a small Singapore company that provides construction services for international oil and gas projects, said it filed a petition to liquidate its operations, after facing payment demands from creditors at a time when its business was under pressure. DBS Group Holdings Ltd., one of the largest lenders to Swiber, said it only expects to recover about half of the S$700 million ($518 million) it loaned to the firm and its units. DBS and Singapore’s two other large banks, Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. and United Overseas Bank Ltd., are exposed to the downturn in the energy sector as a result of their lending to local companies which provide construction, shipping and maintenance services to the […]
The Fund's annual report on Japan's economy came as the country's government announced a new fiscal stimulus package of $13.5 trillion yen (about $132 billion) and the central bank announced a comprehensive review of monetary policy, keeping alive expectations for "helicopter money" - printing money for government debt.
Around the world, governments are planning fresh spending to boost growth and support wages, heeding the advice of the Harvard University economist and others who have argued that economies need the jolt as society ages and productivity sags. That’s signaling the ascendancy of energizers like Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and the firing of austerity advocates such as former U.K. Chancellor George Osborne.
As elections loom next year in France, Germany and the Netherlands, the prospects for political progress to shore up confidence in the single currency’s durability are diminishing, even with the added urgency of the U.K.’s divorce from the European Union. The 19-nation euro area still displays a fundamental split over the direction of its incomplete banking union and, beyond, how to create a common budget to complement monetary policy.
Eurozone economic crisis to drag down BRITAIN as Bank of England 'asleep at the wheel'
Italy’s financial meltdown will spread to Germany and then the UK, and Britain’s banking system is “in no fit state to withstand the storm”, a scathing report has said.
In a major wake-up call to ailing Mark Carney and his beleaguered Bank of England, the Adam Smith Institute said the Bank was “sailing blindly” into a second global financial crisis.
It warned taxpayers could be forced to bail out British banks yet again as the Bank’s stress tests - used to measure robustness - are "worse than useless" and would buckle under the strain of a major economic shock.
