Summit Notebook

Move over, Nouriel Roubini

Mikhail Alexeyev, a veteran of Soviet and Russian banking who now heads Russian operations for Italian bank UniCredit, said he saw the 2008 financial crisis coming when he was still a student at a Soviet state institute of finance.  “I knew it would happen back in 1981, when I was studying political economics. In capitalism you get crises. Marx and Lenin teach us that.”

Loose lips sink stocks

    The president of Renaissance Capital — Russia’s largest home grown investment bank, a fiercely competitive institution which has now survived two crises — is not interested in publicly assessing the competitive landscape in Moscow’s financial sector.     Russia’s stock market was all but shut down in a single day by rumours of distress among brokers, sparked by the selloff of stocks held on margin or as collateral on repurchase agreements.     Operating often on whispers, brokers foreign and domestic slammed shut limits on each other, causing trade on the stock market to seize up.     The first victim — brokerage KIT Finance — was announced by evening and became the first financial instituation to receive a state bailout.      “The crisis has shown that rumours and gossiping about competitors is a very dangerous thing,” Renaissance Capital President Aganbegyan told the Reuters Russian Investment Summit almost a year later.

Is the financial crisis the impetus Kuwait needs for reform?

If there is a silver lining to the impact of the credit crisis in Kuwait, it could be highlighting the poor transparency – even by Gulf Arab standards – in the desert country.
Other Gulf countries such as the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia have taken steps to crack down on corruption or boost transparency in a region where stock prices often move sharply before major company announcements. Most – but not Kuwait — have independent stock market regulators.
Once a regional leader in developing financial markets, Kuwait has fallen behind its neighbours. It would have been almost impossible for investors to discern problems at Kuwait’s Gulf Bank before its rescue last month, economists say.
Lack of transparency can often hide corruption, said Amani Bouresli, finance professor at Kuwait University.
“In terms of corruption, there is the perception of corruption index and every year we have a worse location than the year before,” she said.
The global crisis may add pressure on Kuwait to act, Bouresli said.
“When the index is red you see the government acting,” she said. “I hope if the index goes up again the government won’t stop acting.”
But more decisive measures on disclosure might be too bold a step to expect from Kuwait’s current government. Some have suggested that battles between the government and parliament in Kuwait, perhaps the most democratic of the Gulf Arab states, could hinder the type of action that would be necessary.
“The government knows there is a lot of corruption, but it is weak and unserious,” Kuwaiti economist Naser Alnafisi said.