"The corporate brand is not only used to improve competitive
positioning and express company aspirations, it can also be a powerful
tool to motivate employees."
CFOs might be forgiven for thinking that putting their cash into a European bank is a bit like entrusting your prized aquarium to BP. With corporate deposits at near-record highs and the counterparty reputation of banks at all time lows, some companies are taking matters into their own hands.
At long last, one writer has seriously addressed the potential problems with more stimulus spending. (I sent Paul Krugman a question about this more than a week ago, via a comment on his blog, but from what I can see he has yet to address it. And Dean Baker too easily dismisses the issue, in my opinion.)
The problem is not the federal budget deficit, not at least in the short term, but the potential political fallout from bad decision making. That way, says Steve Randy Waldman, indeed lay a possible US currency crisis. And this is ultimately where Friedrich Hayek and his associates were coming from in blaming Weimar for the disasters that followed.
Corporate banking professionals are less pessimistic about Greece's financial condition than investors are, according to surveys by Bloomberg and by our editorial partner, the Benche, a website sponsored by the Swedish bank, SEB.
According to the Benche, half of its registered members, who work primarily in corporate banking, say Greece will fail to make timely payments of interest and principal on its debt.
It has been almost seven weeks since any European bank issued senior unsecured bonds in the market. Partly to blame is the rapid rise in spread levels, which over that time have increased by 50 bps to 100 bps for double AA-rated banks in Northern Europe and by much more for their cousins from Southern Europe.
But an equal cause of the drought has been the EU-wide guarantee schemes that individual countries set up from October 2008 in the wake of Lehman Brother's collapse. Many of these schemes were due to end last year but they have been extended. Reports suggest that Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Hungary are likely to extend their guarantee schemes beyond June 30th. France Italy and the UK are likely to let their schemes lapse (although the UK allows the government guaranteed bonds issued by banks to be refinanced until 2014).
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