Russia’s Overleveraged Economy as a House of Cards
Andrew Kramer has a piece in today’s New York Times which examines how so many of Russia’s most wealthy people lost so much money in so little time during the current financial crisis. Not a lot of new information, but some interesting quotes:
If banks require businesses to sell shares to repay these loans, “the Russian stock market could come down like a house of cards,” Michael Kavanagh, a mining sector analyst at Uralsib bank, said. “This could be a game changer for a lot of very, very large players,” Rory MacFarquhar, an economist at Goldman Sachs in Moscow, added. “The ground is shifting under them.”