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THE PANEL

FINANCIAL CRISIS

How has the financial crisis affected you?

Every week a panel of readers will be giving their views on the burning issues of the hour. This week: The Panel assess the effects of a crisis that has been emptying wallets worldwide.

How has the financial crisis affected you?

How has the financial crisis affected you?

Claudia Tenenblat

Claudia Tenenblat

It hasn’t yet. I am on a sabbatical, so to speak, living partly on some savings and partly on my husband and a few freelance jobs.

He has a tourism company in Brazil which works mainly with incoming business travellers and those trips tend to be booked well in advance. So, the financial crisis has not caught up with him yet.

It seems that this crisis, unlike others, has hit rich countries harder than developing economies. From what I hear and read, things are under control in Brazil and people are not panicking like in Europe.

Anyway, I do not have debts, either here or there, or any big savings. We were thinking about buying an apartment is Stockholm but I guess it will have to wait now.

Marcus Cederström

Marcus Cederström

I’m in the process of looking for a full-time job. Applying, interviewing, calling, e-mailing, just pestering potential employers. Great timing on my part really.

And I have definitely noticed a downturn in the number of available jobs, especially entry-level positions. Other people my age have talked about settling, taking whatever pops up just to have that sought after full-time job.

I guess you could say I am on the brink of feeling the financial crisis. Not quite there yet but starting to feel the pinch in the job market. Starting to notice more competition.

Starting to notice fewer available jobs. Starting to question the decisions I made that

led to me searching for a job as the world enters the worst economic downturn of my generation.

But panic hasn’t quite set in. Yet. Two months from now might be a different story.

Tiffany Hoffman

Tiffany Hoffman

The less you have, the less you have to lose. Considering I’m decades away from retirement, have no mortgage, have small investments, and a minimal student loan (compared to most), this financial crisis personally affects me very little. But, I see and hear the stress of it all around me.

Granted, I’m not too empathetic to the stock brokers who can no longer afford their SUVs. But, I do care about the school teachers at retirement age with 25% or more of their retirement sunk in the stock market.

With risky 401K plans and social security too small to cover basic needs, US citizens are in trouble.

That’s what I see first-hand. As for the global economy, when one market crashes, the others aren’t far behind.

On the upside for any Americans moving to Sweden, the US dollar is worth more krona now than it has been in years. I might be the only one who can say this right now, but lucky me.

Nabeel Shehzad

Nabeel Shehzad

The financial crisis is the hottest topic in Sweden right now. With every passing day, the Swedish krona is going down against all the currencies of the world.

The day to day things in the stores are getting expensive.

But the major effect, in my opinion, is the level of creeping uncertainty about the future. Like others, I am not sure about investing my savings in anything like buying a home or a new car.

No one knows whether he/she will have a job secured in future or if he/she will be able to pay back a loan or mortgage.

The way the Icelandic economy fell down makes the whole feeling even more horrible. If the same follows in Sweden, then people will think of investing in some other safer countries in Europe.

Gigantic companies like Volvo are firing people like autumn leaves, which will tempt skilled people to move to more stable countries. The Swedish market will shrink and shrink, which is really scary to think of.

Sanna Holmqvist

Sanna Holmqvist

Not a lot yet, but I am convinced we will all be affected in one way or another. I am not worried that I will lose my job, as many others are these days.

The market for flats and houses is in a crisis, with prices going down and few people selling or buying, but I wasn’t planning on selling my flat for another couple of years anyway.

But inevitably, the crisis will affect us all, in the long run; if unemployment increases,

if the house market stands still, if mortgages don’t go down again and if prices on food and other things keep going up. It depends on how long and how severe the recession is going to be, but that no one can tell just now.

Robert Flahiff

Robert Flahiff

At this point, I am not sure how the crisis has affected me personally. I am most concerned about how it will affect the interest rates on home loans here, as I am still renovating my home and have not locked any set interest for any specific amount of time.

I am also keeping an eye on the state of housing prices, as they seem to have leveled off or are sinking a bit, and that will affect my ability to borrow more money for future renovations.

I have not felt a large change in my daily life due to the crisis as of yet, but am enjoying the short-term fall in petrol prices.

I am more concerned with family and friends back home who are really getting hurt by this mess.

Carina Silfverduk

Carina Silfverduk

I came to Sweden to start over after my divorce. My backup plan if I were to have any trouble financially was to use my 401K plan.

I was going to cash out my retirement early because I planned on staying here in Sweden.

Once I got here and saw how difficult it was to get an apartment, I wanted to use my 401K money to buy a house or apartment. Then the stock market plunged so it’s worth so much less and is not even worth taking out.

FINANCIAL CRISIS

US investors buy up north German state bank hit by financial crisis

Two German states said Wednesday they would sell troubled maritime lender HSH Nordbank in the first full privatisation of one of the regionally-owned "Landesbank" lenders hit badly by the financial crisis.

US investors buy up north German state bank hit by financial crisis
Photo: DPA

Leaders from Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein states said at a news conference they would sell their 95-percent stake for one billion euros to investors led by two US funds, J. Christopher Flowers and Cerberus capital.

The European Commission ordered a change of ownership in exchange for its approval in 2009 of a €13-billion-euro rescue – one of two taxpayer-funded bailouts for the north German bank since the 2007-2008 financial crisis.

That rescue plan helped cover risky investments amounting to €60 billion, most of them in real estate and the shipping sector, which HSH built up in the pre-crisis years.

“Today we've reached an important milestone on the way to selling the states' holdings in HSH,” which had over the years proved “very costly to the taxpayer,” Schleswig-Holstein state premier Daniel Günther said.

Wednesday's deal must still earn a green light in a further competition probe by the Commission and from banking supervisors at the European Central Bank.

If it goes ahead, “the privatisation means that we can limit the damage to the states that has resulted from the bank's irresponsible strategy of expansion between 2003 and 2008,” Hamburg mayor and future federal finance minister Olaf Scholz said.

The sale was immediately criticized by Sahra Wagenknecht, leader of Die Linke (the Left Party), who described it as a gift to “the finance mafia.”

“Future profits will be privatized, tax payers will lose multiple billion euros and jobs are at risk – whoever calls that a success doesn't deserve to be finance minister,” she wrote on Twitter.

Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein have taken on a portfolio of HSH's bad loans, meaning taxpayers could face a bill of up to €7 billion when they are eventually sold to private buyers.

The contract for Wednesday's sale also provides for HSH's payroll to be halved, to around 1,000 workers.

HSH's departure into the private sector leaves just five of the “Landesbank” lenders standing after a series of post-crisis interventions.