Troubles with the Chf Loans in Croatia: The Story of a Case Still Waiting to Be Closed

In numerous Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, the global financial crisis as well as the unpegging of the foreign exchange rate of the Swiss franc (CHF) against the euro amplified the repayment troubles of households with the outstanding CHF-linked debt. In Croatia, the CHF loans were approved mainly as mortgages to unprotected and subprime household borrowers without sufficient credit capacity for long-term euro-linked loans, which also contained a possibility of an incremental interest rate change, i.e., the so-called administrative interest rate. This article aims to disclose the reasons behind the credit boom of these loans, the unsustainable CHF debt hardship that the household sector consequently faced, and how it was/could have been resolved, with the Croatian banking sector at the center of the research. Although the CHF case of Croatia has some specificities concerning the prudential regulation and government-sponsored loan conversion, the findings about the supply and demand determinants of the CHF credit boom, as well as a critical assessment of the Croatian government and central bank interventions, might be useful for timely noticing universal threats from the exotic currency-linked loans for the systemic risk and financial stability, and for minimizing the negative externalities from probable debt relief measures. Based on the descriptive and univariate statistics conducted on Bloomberg and the Croatian National Bank (CNB) data, it was found that interest rate differentials and carry trading behavior were the main reasons for the rapid CHF credit growth in Croatia. Nevertheless, according to the financial experts’ opinions obtained via a questionnaire survey, and the court verdicts reached since, the financial consumer protection when contracting these loans was severely violated, which implies that the central bank must enhance its consumer protection role. By adopting a single-country and holistic approach, this is the first paper that deals with the socioeconomic dynamic of the CHF credit default issues in Croatia, which might be interesting as a case study or for making comparison with other CEE countries that have been coping with negative consequences of Swiss francization.

Visualizing Debt and Credit in Hồ Chí Minh City

While conducting research on debt in the lives of sex workers in Hồ Chí Minh City, I stumbled upon an ad a moneylender had glued to a wall. It revealed that financialization was thriving in Vietnam, and more specifically that credit was rapidly expanding and colonizing the urban landscape. Photography became a tool to visually capture this radical financial transformation. This article argues that photography can be an effective inductive research method for moving from the particular to the general and seeing the big picture. I contend that looking at the world through the camera viewfinder with an open mind can help us to uncover hidden patterns and generate a rich and meaningful overall picture of a research problem. This process facilitates the formation of research perspectives and generalizations based on observations. I support this argument by describing the reflexive journey that drove me from photographing debt records in enclosed spaces to wandering in Hồ Chí Minh City’s streets to document a thriving credit boom. This journey radically transformed my research agenda on credit and debt.

Prospects for Turkey in 2021

Significance Fiscal and monetary stimuli and a policy-induced credit boom have combined with the broad normalisation of social life to contain COVID-19's impact on economic output. However, the authorities have been reining in these policies as external balances weaken and the lira crashes.

Russian middle class: Structure and financial behavior

While the term “middle class” is widely used in economic literature, its quantitative estimates vary greatly, and the choice of an appropriate methodology is one of the key issues. Applying the base income approach together with behavioral metrics, we estimated the share of the Russian middle class at around 32% of population in 2018, the lowest level in the last decade. The deterioration observed in the position of the middle class was partially mirrored in the behavioral changes. This group of population was less engaged in the credit boom which started since 2016 and did not actively use financial leverage to support its consumption. Finally, the Russian middle class has changed its social landscape: the analysis of its occupational activity shows a strong shift towards state employment rather than entrepreneurial activity.

Taming the Megabanks

This book demonstrates that universal banks—which accept deposits, make loans, and engage in securities activities—played central roles in precipitating the Great Depression of the early 1930s and the Great Recession of 2007–09. Universal banks promoted a dangerous credit boom and a hazardous stock market bubble in the U.S. during the 1920s, which led to the Great Depression. Congress responded by passing the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which separated banks from the securities markets and prohibited nonbanks from accepting deposits. Glass-Steagall’s structural separation of the banking, securities, and insurance sectors prevented financial panics from spreading across the U.S. financial system for more than four decades. Despite Glass-Steagall’s success, large U.S. banks pursued a twenty-year campaign to remove the statute’s prudential buffers. Regulators opened loopholes in Glass-Steagall during the 1980s and 1990s, and Congress repealed Glass-Steagall in 1999. The United Kingdom and the European Union adopted similar deregulatory measures, thereby allowing universal banks to dominate financial markets on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition, large U.S. securities firms became “shadow banks” as regulators allowed them to issue short-term deposit substitutes to finance long-term loans and investments. Universal banks and shadow banks fueled a toxic subprime credit boom in the U.S., U.K., and Europe during the 2000s, which led to the Great Recession. Limited reforms after the Great Recession have not broken up universal banks and shadow banks, thereby leaving in place a financial system that is prone to excessive risk-taking and vulnerable to contagious panics. A new Glass-Steagall Act is urgently needed to restore a financial system that is less risky, more stable and resilient, and better able to serve the needs of our economy and society.

Foreign Affairs

A speculative and unstable credit boom occurred in overseas markets during the 1920s, as universal banks and private investment banks competed aggressively to sell more than $12 billion of foreign bonds to U.S. investors. The resulting surge in overseas lending left many governments and private sector borrowers in Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America in a dangerously exposed position when U.S. investors lost their appetite for foreign bonds at the end of the 1920s. Universal banks and investment banks sold many unsound foreign bonds to unsophisticated and trusting American investors. The massive sales of risky domestic and foreign securities by universal banks and investment banks had highly adverse effects on the U.S. economy, foreign economies, and investors when the domestic and overseas financing booms abruptly ended following the stock market crash in late 1929.

Frenzy

Large commercial banks and their securities affiliates helped to finance an unsustainable credit boom and stock market bubble during the 1920s. Charles Mitchell of National City Bank and Albert Wiggin of Chase National Bank pioneered a new universal banking (“financial department store”) business model for large commercial banks. The rise of universal banks resulted in frenzied competition between those institutions and private investment banks. That rivalry resulted in the widespread marketing and sale of speculative, high-risk securities to unsophisticated, poorly informed investors. More than $80 billion of debt and equity securities were issued in the U.S. between 1919 and 1930. The easy availability of financing during the 1920s caused many American companies and households to overexpand and take on excessive debts. Those debt burdens left businesses and consumers in a highly vulnerable position when the credit boom suddenly ended in late 1929.

Déjà Vu

Like the credit boom of the 1920s, the toxic credit bubble of the 2000s precipitated a devastating global financial crisis. The desire to earn quick profits from originating and securitizing subprime loans corrupted the risk management practices of large financial conglomerates and the credit review practices of credit ratings agencies that assigned investment ratings to mortgage-related securities. By the end of 2006, U.S. credit markets resembled an inverted pyramid of risk, in which multiple layers of financial bets depended on the performance of high-risk subprime loans held in securitized pools. When housing prices began to fall and subprime loans began to default in large numbers in 2007, the leveraged bets on top of that pyramid of risk blew up and inflicted devastating losses on financial institutions and investors in the U.S. and Europe. Officials on both sides of the Atlantic were slow to recognize and respond to the severity of the crisis. The Federal Reserve Board and the Treasury Department missed multiple warning signs that should have caused them to increase their oversight of major U.S. banks and other large financial institutions during 2007 and early 2008.

Financialization from the margins

This article investigates how the Argentine subproletariat perceives the recent consumer credit boom, based on several field visits carried out in one of Argentina's industrial hubs between 2007 and 2016. It analyzes the credit boom in relation to the wider social transformations induced by the leftist Peronist governments during 2003–2015 (especially the incorporation of informal workers into the social protection system). It argues the rise of consumer credit is perceived by those who use it with ambivalence. While it has allowed the subproletariat to access a form of consumption that was previously restricted to upper classes, it also exposes this population to a new form of exploitation based on the discrepancy between the (monthly based) time of finance and the (erratic) time of work.