Uncertainty reigns among the world’s financiers. As Societe Generale boss Frédéric Oudéa said internally, “it is a crisis whose outcome and all the consequences are still difficult to understand today”.
Could the war waged by Russia in Ukraine, like the economic sanctions, of unparalleled magnitude, inflicted on Moscow in retaliation by the Western allies, produce the effect of a new “Lehman Brothers”? In 2008, the bankruptcy of this American investment bank precipitated the global financial crisis.
To date, the financial sector does not believe in such a risk of contagion, even if it remains attentive to the evolution of the military situation in Ukraine, to China’s position with regard to Russia and to the market hydrocarbons.
The sanctions adopted at an unprecedented pace by the West against Moscow, directed both against the Russian central bank and against several large banks, disconnected from the Swift international financial network, have paralyzed part of the banking and financial system of the country, caused a collapse of the ruble and damaged the Russian economy, plunged into high inflation. The Moscow Stock Exchange was thus closed by the Kremlin on February 28 to retain foreign capital.
However, Nicolas Véron, economist at the European think tank Bruegel and at the Peterson Institute in Washington, does not see any“instability of the international financial system”. “The decoupling of Russia from the Western financial system has already taken placehe analyzes. The market has widely priced in the eviction of Western banks from the country, and the evacuation of Russian banks from Western Europe is underway. The Russian central bank has been suspended from the Bank for International Settlements » considered the central bank of central banks. “Now this separation has been absorbed, he said, without causing systemic risk. »
The financial sector is also approaching this crisis with good resilience. International regulations known as “Basel III”, adopted after the 2008 crisis, required banks to build up capital cushions to withstand shocks.
“Compared to the days of Lehman Brothers, today there is a lot of liquidity in the market. In addition, central banks now have experience of extreme crisis situations and still have tools to stabilize financial risk., explains David Benamou, managing partner at Axiom. For the latter, “we are not immune to the bankruptcy of a fund. With rising commodity prices and falling rouble, hedging is a financial risk. He can therefore there will be spectacular incidents, but not comparable to 2008”.
You have 58.87% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.