Bank Restructuring: Developments in 1999

Abstract

The purpose of this note is to briefly review developments in the Russian banking sector in 1999, in particular the efforts towards restructuring. There are three main points that I would like to make: 1. The difficult situation of the Russian banking system is not primarily a consequence of the August 1998 financial crash. 2. The health of the banking system has not improved substantially in 1999, and this is partly due to slow progress in bank restructuring. 3. More fundamentally, the banking industry suffers from a set of structural problems in the real sector