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Russian Banking System Teetering, Accelerated Withdrawals Underway
naked capitalism — ... trust in all but the biggest state banks, VTB and Sberbank, which have received most of the government’s liquidity support. Tatyana Sadovskaya, the director of a branch of Khnati Mansisk Bank in the city of Nizhnevartovsk, on Wednesday told Interfax news agency that in response to rumours of her bank’s insolvency: “People have formed long lines at cashiers and at bankomats, people are taking their deposits and closing their accounts.” From a later FT article "The East is in the red": Across central and eastern Europe, the global crisis is ...

Pink Picks
FT Alphaville — ... It is open season on the hedgies. The Italian Treasury minister calls for their systematic extermination. Bans on shorting have wrecked strategies that depend on hedging, such as convertible arbitrage. Amid gleeful commentary on faltering returns, politicians start demanding a shorter regulatory leash. But some perspective is needed. Analysis: The east is in the red Across central and eastern Europe, from Russia to Latvia, the global crisis is biting hard, albeit very unevenly, writes the FT’s Eastern Europe editor Stefan Wagstyl. With the global crisis still raging, despite ...

Emerging Market Developments
The Baseline Scenario — ... 5 billion euros from the European Central Bank, Ukraine was looking for $14 billion from the IMF. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the IMF, said, “Many countries seem to be experiencing problems because of the repatriation of private capital by foreign investors or the reduction of credit lines from foreign banks.” In other words, in a global credit crisis, people don’t want to lend to emerging markets. (The FT also published more analysis of Eastern Europe by Stefan Wagstyl .) Finally, Newsweek has a story about the crisis in ...