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Mix-Ansicht- Finanzkrise in Korea: When good banks go bad - Sorrento, 05.04.2004, 17:00
Finanzkrise in Korea: When good banks go bad
-->Auch in Korea dreht sich die Verschuldungsspirale immer weiter, nachdem erst vor einigen Wochen eine Pleite der größten Kreditkartenfirma LG Card nur knapp dank einer staatlichen Finanzspritze abgewendet werden konnte, wird der"Schwarze Peter" jetzt auf eine staatlich garantierte Bad Bank weitergeschoben.
Korea: When good banks go bad
By David Scofield
Last year was a bad one for South Korea's domestic banks. Mired in mountains of unpaid consumer debt, the nation's largest lenders lost an estimated US$7 billion in credit-card operations alone in 2003. And with the default rate rising, 2004 seemed set to be at least as harsh.
According to the central Bank of Korea, total household debts topped $375 billion at the end of 2003, and as of the end of last month outstanding consumer loans equaled $218 billion - 42 percent of which is due to mature this year. There are more than 3.7 million credit defaulters in South Korea, more than 16 percent of the nation's workforce, and this number could surpass 4 million before the year is out. Banks absorbed more than $30 billion in new delinquent debt last year, more than double what was incurred in 2002.
But never fear, the Korean Finance and Economy Ministry has decided to form a new state bank to co-exist with the other de facto state banks that recklessly issued enormous volumes of credit in the first place. The"Bad Bank", as it's being called, is actually a consortium of commercial banks - most state-controlled - and the government-run Korea Asset Management Corp that will buy up each other's bad consumer debt, allowing them to clear the non-performing loans off their books and, presumably, attract more investment. This Bad Bank will then offer deals to the defaulters...
This scheme is the latest in what seems an endless list of stopgap measures recently instituted by the South Korean government. Other plans range from large principal write-downs and sharp interest-rate cuts for people with $8,500 or less in default, to debt rollovers and rescheduling, replete with interest-rate cuts and principal reductions, for those with $270,000 or less in debt through the state-run Credit Counseling and Recovery Service...
But should China's growth slow or, heaven forbid, its own bad-debt problem rise to the fore, Korea could be left without its primary economic engine....
The reality is that South Korea has created almost 800,000 manufacturing jobs in China over the past 12 years as its largest firms, themselves recipients of countless billions in subsidies and state"investment" in line with national growth and development strategies, move their operations to China to capitalize on low wages, favorable regulations, and access to a potential market that tops a billion people.
[anstatt Korea könnte hier genausogut Japan, USA oder Europa stehen]
Meanwhile, Korea's domestic economy continues to limp along, largely driven by increasingly unrecoverable consumer debt...
And while these programs give the impression that money owed will somehow just disappear, the billions of dollars will ultimately become the responsibility of the nation's beleaguered taxpayers, as the majority of the banks involved in these"workouts" operate under the direction of the government. The entire affair is really a shell game with the nations' citizens left paying the bill at the end of the day.
Gruß,
Sorrento
<ul> ~ Asian Times</ul>
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