I meant to blog about this as it crossed over the wires and dealing screens Monday:
Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev said international rating agencies were biased against Kazakh banks
"Considering that Kazakhstan as a state provides substantial support to domestic banks, construction companies and small and medium business and also that the Kazakh economy is stable and on a firm footing, it's subjective to downgrade ratings," Nazarbayev told journalists in Pavlodar."I think that rating agencies have to consider that Kazakhstan is on a stable footing and will not allow any of its banks to go under," he said."I had already said that if such a situation continued, we would buy out shares of our companies themselves," he said, as cited by Interfax.
The global credit crunch, aside from effectively flooring Northern Rock has wreaked havoc in the Kazakhstani banking system. The Central Bank has pumped in liquidity and this has stabilized what otherwise threatened to be a run on a number of banks.
The picture is much prettier if you also caught how ATF Bank – being sold to Unicredit – had blatantly tried to screw its minority preference shareholders, to funnel all the money into the pockets of a few, very well-connected hangers-on from the Nazarbayev clan. You have to admire plucky little hedge fund, QVT, for sticking to its guns and demanding that ATF and Unicredit play fair: good luck to them! Unicredit seems to attract controversy when it buys these rinky-dink banks. In truth I wonder whether the real lesson we all should be learning here is that - contrary to abundant western-market opinion - Kakakhstan is actually as hopelessly inadequate, for real commercial rule of law, as the other 'stans.
Most of the domestic banking system is controlled either by the First Family, or by their mates, and, boy, have they screwed it up or what?
Today I read that Fitch ratings has followed where S&P have already trodden and have altered their Outlook across most of the KAZ banking sector from “Stable” to “Negative”. Most of these banks now have an S&P rating equivalent of BB-, which means not really good enough credit quality for their banks’ bonds to be bought by mainstream global investment institutions (but only specialist, high-risk funds).
What I think is interesting about the Nazarbayev quote is that, in effect, he says that the Government will guarantee the banking system. Now leaving aside issues about ‘moral hazard’, I have to say that maybe the ratings agencies have got it wrong. If oil-rich Kazakhstan will, as the President says, step in and rescue any bank, then surely the banks’ ratings should rise.
Conversely, it is the sovereign rating for Kazakhstan itself (already recently lowered by S&P to BBB-) which should be lowered again; because de facto Nazarbayev has just added all those banks’ debts to his national balance sheet.
Not, BTW, the brightest move in terms of sound financial economic management; but I suppose if you treat the banking system as being a personal plaything, like you treat the state as a whole…
Showing posts with label Kazakhstani politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kazakhstani politics. Show all posts
Wednesday, 19 December 2007
Tuesday, 29 May 2007
Moscow cheers as Yuschenko implodes…and other weekend Eurasian mayhem
On the face of it, it's not been a 'great' start to the week in any of the countries in my 'patch'...
Kyiv went to the brink and back this weekend, yes? Well, not quite. There was, frankly, something quite Wag the dog about the breathless news reporting I watched on the BBC and CNN, in our Kyiv apartment and the streets of Kyiv itself. I scarcely saw any troops and there seemed no more security on the streets than usual.
When Mr Orange Revolution grabbed control over the Interior Ministry troops – memo to wannabe democracies: why do you need 40,000 ‘interior ministry’ troops if not to use against your own people? – and summoned them to Kyiv he looked, if just for a moment, as bad as the Kuchma regime he had replaced.
Sunday, of course, we all woke up to see that Yush and Yank have finally agreed an election date. But here’s what I heard Sunday: the American, German and Polish governments were furious with Yuschenko – summoning troops to Kyiv? Way bad move! – and the US told him it would ‘pull the plug’, more or less publicly, on backing him further. Faced with that calamity, President Yuschenko had no choice but to cave in and accept Prime Minister Yanukovych’s proposed date for Verkhovna Rada elections.
If this is your thing do check out Foreign Notes, the Ukrainian political blog in English which has been quite brilliant on this stuff recently.
Events having rather overtaken things, my lunch Friday with a sometime Yuschenko adviser (an economist running a local NGO) now seems rather academic; but these gobbets are maybe worth passing on:
- There is no meaningful electoral law in Ukraine and no-one is legitimate; the constitution is something of a farce and is not a sustainable rulebook for what happens next
- The Supreme Court is a useless hive of cronies and “neither side” [there are only two sides? - Exile] sets much store in what it says; if it actually says something (the cronies go-run-hide when real chaos emerges).
- People on both Orange and Blue sides are coming round to the idea that there needs to be a Constitutional Convention, before the Elections, to decide which of the laws passed by the, technically dismissed, Verkhovna Rada to keep – some are quite good - as well as to agree a proper electoral law
- The move to ‘Parliamentary’ over Executive Presidential government seems unstoppable
- At some point, one side has to lose and that will be when the ‘fun’ will begin.
Yuschenko? Sell / Yanukovych becoming a statesman in spite of himself? Buy
Meanwhile, in Kazakhstan, Dariga Nazarbaeva and her husband, Rakhat Aliyev, have finally cut the cord and are striving for political power themselves. Now, personally, I think the son-in-law is a scum-bag (only my opinion, natch, and one I'll have to...ahem...revise, I guess, if he emerges victorious) and my people in Astana say some serious locals are backing away from her Institute of International Modern Politics (the well-funded, if shadowy, ‘NGO’ that is really her prototype opposition party HQ): daughter number one seems to have seriously miscalculated.
Kazakhstani Offspring? Sell.
Whatever else you might think about her father – no prize from the Kennedy School of Government for developing pluralist democracy, maybe – Nursultan Nazarbayev is probably the best and most successful statesman to have emerged from the collapse of the USSR: and yes, that includes VVP. He is genuinely respected amongst the Kazakhstani, especially the ethnic Kazakhs, and has prevailed over staggering economic transformation and a much better civil rights environment than any of the other ‘Stans.
President for Life? Buy
Meanwhile, in Moscow – to which I flew back Sunday night - apparently the gays had been at it again…lemming-like, a small band seems intent on inviting disaster upon themselves. This annual ‘gay riot’ photo-opportunity has already got tiresome… Personally I think every ‘world city’ benefits from a pink-quartier, but this is Moscow, people. Never, ever, here.
Civil rights are a tricky thing. Martin Luther King dragged America towards the civilized treatment of its fellow citizens. But for him, and heroes like Rosa Parks, American blacks would not have the civil rights they have today (whether they can afford to enjoy them being, of course, another thing….). They got those rights through protest.
But in the case of gay rights, the Russian gay community has to consider this: it is clinging on to the decriminalization of homosexuality by its fingertips. By going out to ask for more rights, it might just lose the one ‘right’ it has.
As I recall, a Bill, introduced February 12th by Liberal Democratic Party Deputy, Nikolai Kuryanovich, sits before the State Duma to repeal the decriminalization of homosexuality. So far, I believe, the Government lets it linger there actif, mais en repose. Kuryanovich – who is not exactly the most liberal human being imaginable – has a penchant for popularist legislation: not long ago he proposed stripping citizenship for any Russian woman who married a foreigner.
This is not an area of policy I follow, but I think there is a 30-40% chance that, if United Russia senses that an extra dose of popularist measures is needed before the Duma elections in December, the Bill could well be activated and passed. Such a move would be wildly popular with the Russian electorate – the bit that actually votes that is - which would never have supported the decriminalization of homosexuality in the first place (one of the noteworthy examples, actually, of how Yeltsin’s Young Turks led liberalism in Russia, rather than reflected it).
Rather than protest in the streets, Russian gays would be best advised to lay low until this political cycle is over and the Duma/Presidential elections completed. Alternatively, they might consider moving abroad.
La vie en rose? Hold/Sell
Kyiv went to the brink and back this weekend, yes? Well, not quite. There was, frankly, something quite Wag the dog about the breathless news reporting I watched on the BBC and CNN, in our Kyiv apartment and the streets of Kyiv itself. I scarcely saw any troops and there seemed no more security on the streets than usual.
When Mr Orange Revolution grabbed control over the Interior Ministry troops – memo to wannabe democracies: why do you need 40,000 ‘interior ministry’ troops if not to use against your own people? – and summoned them to Kyiv he looked, if just for a moment, as bad as the Kuchma regime he had replaced.
Sunday, of course, we all woke up to see that Yush and Yank have finally agreed an election date. But here’s what I heard Sunday: the American, German and Polish governments were furious with Yuschenko – summoning troops to Kyiv? Way bad move! – and the US told him it would ‘pull the plug’, more or less publicly, on backing him further. Faced with that calamity, President Yuschenko had no choice but to cave in and accept Prime Minister Yanukovych’s proposed date for Verkhovna Rada elections.
If this is your thing do check out Foreign Notes, the Ukrainian political blog in English which has been quite brilliant on this stuff recently.
Events having rather overtaken things, my lunch Friday with a sometime Yuschenko adviser (an economist running a local NGO) now seems rather academic; but these gobbets are maybe worth passing on:
- There is no meaningful electoral law in Ukraine and no-one is legitimate; the constitution is something of a farce and is not a sustainable rulebook for what happens next
- The Supreme Court is a useless hive of cronies and “neither side” [there are only two sides? - Exile] sets much store in what it says; if it actually says something (the cronies go-run-hide when real chaos emerges).
- People on both Orange and Blue sides are coming round to the idea that there needs to be a Constitutional Convention, before the Elections, to decide which of the laws passed by the, technically dismissed, Verkhovna Rada to keep – some are quite good - as well as to agree a proper electoral law
- The move to ‘Parliamentary’ over Executive Presidential government seems unstoppable
- At some point, one side has to lose and that will be when the ‘fun’ will begin.
Yuschenko? Sell / Yanukovych becoming a statesman in spite of himself? Buy
Meanwhile, in Kazakhstan, Dariga Nazarbaeva and her husband, Rakhat Aliyev, have finally cut the cord and are striving for political power themselves. Now, personally, I think the son-in-law is a scum-bag (only my opinion, natch, and one I'll have to...ahem...revise, I guess, if he emerges victorious) and my people in Astana say some serious locals are backing away from her Institute of International Modern Politics (the well-funded, if shadowy, ‘NGO’ that is really her prototype opposition party HQ): daughter number one seems to have seriously miscalculated.
Kazakhstani Offspring? Sell.
Whatever else you might think about her father – no prize from the Kennedy School of Government for developing pluralist democracy, maybe – Nursultan Nazarbayev is probably the best and most successful statesman to have emerged from the collapse of the USSR: and yes, that includes VVP. He is genuinely respected amongst the Kazakhstani, especially the ethnic Kazakhs, and has prevailed over staggering economic transformation and a much better civil rights environment than any of the other ‘Stans.
President for Life? Buy
Meanwhile, in Moscow – to which I flew back Sunday night - apparently the gays had been at it again…lemming-like, a small band seems intent on inviting disaster upon themselves. This annual ‘gay riot’ photo-opportunity has already got tiresome… Personally I think every ‘world city’ benefits from a pink-quartier, but this is Moscow, people. Never, ever, here.
Civil rights are a tricky thing. Martin Luther King dragged America towards the civilized treatment of its fellow citizens. But for him, and heroes like Rosa Parks, American blacks would not have the civil rights they have today (whether they can afford to enjoy them being, of course, another thing….). They got those rights through protest.
But in the case of gay rights, the Russian gay community has to consider this: it is clinging on to the decriminalization of homosexuality by its fingertips. By going out to ask for more rights, it might just lose the one ‘right’ it has.
As I recall, a Bill, introduced February 12th by Liberal Democratic Party Deputy, Nikolai Kuryanovich, sits before the State Duma to repeal the decriminalization of homosexuality. So far, I believe, the Government lets it linger there actif, mais en repose. Kuryanovich – who is not exactly the most liberal human being imaginable – has a penchant for popularist legislation: not long ago he proposed stripping citizenship for any Russian woman who married a foreigner.
This is not an area of policy I follow, but I think there is a 30-40% chance that, if United Russia senses that an extra dose of popularist measures is needed before the Duma elections in December, the Bill could well be activated and passed. Such a move would be wildly popular with the Russian electorate – the bit that actually votes that is - which would never have supported the decriminalization of homosexuality in the first place (one of the noteworthy examples, actually, of how Yeltsin’s Young Turks led liberalism in Russia, rather than reflected it).
Rather than protest in the streets, Russian gays would be best advised to lay low until this political cycle is over and the Duma/Presidential elections completed. Alternatively, they might consider moving abroad.
La vie en rose? Hold/Sell
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
