Real Word Bank - Banking News and Articles
  World Bank Banking News and Articles | Contact
Latest Banking News and Articles


Banks, Debtor Nations Aren't Breathing Easier

A year ago, when international financiers gathered in Toronto for the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund, most of them had Mexico on their minds.The Latin American debt crisis then was barely a month old, touched off in late August when Mexico told its lenders gathered in the dining room of the New York Federal Reserve Bank that it no longer could pay any principal on its outstanding debts.

James C. Berry, who succeeded Jake F. Butcher on Monday as chairman of United American Bank in Hamilton County, said today that a investors' group Berry heads has agreed to buy the Chattanooga bank from Butcher. Berry, founder and president of Republic Parking Systems, made the announcement at a morning press conference.

Sample food from Russia, Japan, Argentina this weekend. Watch German, Irish, Israeli, Saudi Arabian and Greek dancers. Stroll through some English gardens. Visit a Left Bank art show, a la Parisienne.Your feet won't have to leave Dade County, thanks to the Around the World Fair at Tropical Park this Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

When he finished the painting "Christina's World" in 1948, Andrew Wyeth displayed it at his summer home in Cushing, Maine. It was a simple painting, austere and subdued, depicting the frail and twisted body of a woman dressed in pink crawling through a brown field toward a somber gray house atop a knoll.

The Jewish population of the occupied West Bank of the Jordan River will more than double this year and reach 70,000, a settlements spokesman said Wednesday.Ze'ev Ben-Yosef, spokesman for the settlement department of the World Zionist Organization, said that 7,000 new apartments and houses have been built and would be taken over by their owners by October. He said the present Jewish population of the West Bank was 30,000 in 108 settlements.

Though he's not a surefire winner, Jimmy Connors is heavily favored in the Bank of Oklahoma Tennis Classic, which starts Wednesday night at Shadow Mountain Racquet Club.Connors, ranked No. 3 in the world by the Association of Tennis Professionals, is the top seed in the $100,000 classic."

A group of students and a teacher who started a bank in the classroom were learning a lot about high finance when the state decided to teach them a lesson about the law - by shutting them down."The law is the law," said Robert Ledbetter, the state deputy banking commissioner whose examiners closed the bank at Easton Middle School for not having a charter, among other infractions.

The Maryland House of Delegates tonight approved a major bank deregulation measure that for the first time would allow credit card membership fees, a wide variety of other charges and variable interest rates on consumer loans.

A leading Tokyo bank today announced plans to buy two commercial lending units of Walter E. Heller International Corp. for $425 million, the largest takeover of a U.S. company ever undertaken by a Japanese firm.The cash purchase by The Fuji Bank Ltd. marks both the largest U.S. acquisition by a Japanese firm and the first major entry into the domestic financial services market by a Japanese bank.

Ireland's biggest bank signed an agreement yesterday to take over First Maryland Bancorp, the holding company for First National Bank of Maryland.It is the second time in less than two years that a major bank in the Washington area has been taken over by foreign interests.Under terms of the agreement signed yesterday, Allied Irish Banks Ltd. of Dublin will acquire about 43 percent of the $3.4 billion Baltimore bank company by the end of the year.

You can't see or hear or touch the international debt bomb that is ticking in many developing countries.But you can feel it, if you listen to the message that some Third World representatives delivered at a special three-day conference held by the Global Interdependence Center in Philadelphia last week.A scenario drawn from the comments of bankers and politicians from Mexico, Brazil and Peru might go something like this.

When a real country starts to look like a Graham Greene novel, it is time to start asking some very fundamental questions about what went wrong. It is clear the group of young men and woman who surrounded Maurice Bishop, the murdered prime minister, were, politically, totally out of their depth. Grenada is one of the smallest Caribbean islands.

Mayor Andy Coats' face lights up at the mere mention of Oklahoma City's bid to bring the World's Fair here in 1989.""If we can get it done and do it right, it would give us a chance to show Oklahoma City off to the nation and the world,'' Coats said.The city will submit its application to become a World's Fair site to the U.S. Department of Commerce in early October.

The prevalent view in San Juan is that Johnny de la Rosa represents an easy mark today for World Boxing Council featherweight champion Juan Laporte.The Puerto Rican title-holder will fatten his bank account while flashing his skills for his countrymen and a CBS-TV audience (Ch. 4, 4:30 p.m.), Laporte's management and backers assume.

Despite renewed hopes for global economic recovery, the Third World debt problem "will not solve itself," leading government officials of the rich nations will be told at a Paris meeting of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development early in May.OECD officials are concerned that, in the wake of the recent decision by member governments to expand International Monetary Fund resources, a sense of complacency has arisen with respect to the debt.

Steel Corporation has now widened the attack against its adversaries, who are numerous. The company has filed suits against Brazil, Argentina and Mexico for shipping heavily subsidized steel into the United States. It promises further suits against other Third World countries. The company's chairman, David M. Roderick, last week also denounced the international lending agencies--meaning chiefly the World Bank.

Boston is one of the best cities in America to look at from a distance. The best view, some say, is east from a point on the Cambridge bank of the Charles River near the MIT boathouse.From there you see the gentle russet bulge of Beacon Hill with the gold dome at the peak - dignified, stately old Boston - against the colossal backdrop of downtown office buildings - the so- called new Boston.

The Bank of Findlay aims to get customers from around the nation with a promotion handing out two Colt handguns in return for six-year deposits of $2,500.Greg Bohlen, marketing vice president of the small bank in this central Illinois hamlet, said the promotion will go nationwide after an article about the marketing plan in The New York Times.

The U.S. Export-Import Bank, a federal agency that lends money to foreign purchasers of U.S. goods, said yesterday it has postponed a decision on financing equipment sales for a huge steel mill in South Korea.

Related Articles

1977-A

Newsnipits