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Vietnam Banking Reform in Trouble: Experts
Cat Barton | June 10, 2012
Vietnam’s drive to restructure its troubled banking sector is being derailed by powerful interest groups as the political will needed to force through painful reforms falters, experts say.
present continuous = Hard Vietnam untuk merestrukturisasi sektor perbankan yang bermasalah yang sedang tergelincir oleh kelompok kepentingan yang kuat sebagai kemauan politik diperlukan untuk memaksa melalui reformasi menyakitkan kehilangan momentum, para ahli mengatakan.

After a decade of rapid, chaotic bank liberalization, Vietnam has ended up with too many domestic banks (42) — many of which are overloaded with toxic debt — and poor governance across the system, economists warn.

Last year, faced with persistently high inflation and critical liquidity conditions at many of the weaker banks, the government announced aggressive restructuring plans.

But as inflation has fallen — from a high of 23 percent last August to 8.3 percent in May, allowing the central bank to increase monetary supply and easing banks’ liquidity problems — so too have appetites for reform.

“Things have calmed down a bit because of falling inflation. So now they’re thinking ‘OK we don’t have to be so aggressive’,” said economist Nguyen Xuan Thanh, director of the public policy program at the Fulbright School in Ho Chi Minh City.

“The second factor [slowing reform] is the resistance from the banks, from the owners of the banks... the political economy doesn’t allow the government to act decisively by taking over a bank and cleaning it up to sell.”

Aside from five fully-foreign owned banks, such as ANZ and HSBC, the sector is dominated by large state-owned banks and dozens of smaller joint stock banks owned by public or private investors.
Present tenses = Selain lima sepenuhnya-asing bank milik, seperti ANZ dan HSBC, sektor ini didominasi oleh besar bank BUMN dan puluhan bank kecil saham gabungan yang dimiliki oleh investor publik atau swasta.

After years of rapid credit growth, the balance sheets of many of these banks are weighed down with toxic loans — the majority of which went to badly-run state-owned enterprises and speculative property investments.

While the larger state banks benefit from an implicit government guarantee and continued investor confidence, many of the joint stock banks have serious liquidity problems and can barely stay afloat, experts say.

This has hit the broader economy — credit lines have all but dried up which has affected small and medium businesses particularly badly with some 18,000 going bankrupt this year alone.

Unless there is decisive restructuring, the system will remain unhealthy “and the economy as a whole will suffer”, said Thanh.

What the government needs to do is “take over the weakest banks, merge them, sell off the bad debt and then resell the merged bank”, said Jonathan Pincus, a HCMC-based economist from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Vietnam program.

“It would be quicker and less risky for the system as a whole. But bank owners would resist this,” he said.

To have a banking license in Vietnam, one Hanoi-based diplomat said, you have to be “very well connected”. Bank ownership brings benefits — the possibility of kickbacks, access to cheap credit.

Many small joint stock banks are owned by subsidiaries of state-owned enterprises or well-connected groups of investors who own multiple banks, evading regulations with accounting tricks.
present tenses = Banyak bank kecil saham gabungan yang dimiliki oleh anak perusahaan dariperusahaan milik negara atau yang memiliki koneksi kelompok investor yang memilikibeberapa bank, menghindari peraturan dengan trik akuntansi.
The sector is riddled with complex cross ownership patterns which are proving “politically difficult to unwind”, Pincus said.

The government’s reform plan relies on private sector voluntary mergers to improve systemic liquidity by having those with healthy balance sheets absorb those in trouble.

But many banks are hiding the true state of their balance sheets and finding ways to hide their non-performing loans (NPLs), Pincus told AFP.

“They loan money to customers of other banks, who use the money to close out their loans with others. Customers of other banks do that with them. It keeps everyone’s NPL rate down,” he said.

The government has divided the banks into four categories with different credit growth ceilings for 2012 — in effect, identifying the weaker institutions and banning them from lending.

Five to eight of them will be merged this year, the government has said, although it now appears “embarrassed” and is backing off from this pledge, said Le Tham Duong from the Ho Chi Minh City Banking University.

With the first merger of three weak banks in December, rather than the government taking over the institutions, writing off bad debts, and seriously restructuring, the banks were simply rolled together, experts say.

Vietnam’s central bank chief Nguyen Van Binh has said that “in the near future there will be more voluntary mergers and acquisitions under the State Bank’s strict supervision”.

But what is needed is serious state-led restructuring not private sector mergers, said Fulbright’s Thanh, adding that this would require huge resources and a clear admission of the scale of the bad debt problem.

“Politically and legally if you do that it is very risky,” he said. “First there needs to be political will which is still lacking.






Singapore's Starcount Measures Social Media Popularity
The Jakarta Globe | June 10, 2012

If the music world has Billboard charts and the film world has box office numbers as reliable ways to measure success, social media now has Starcount to gauge popularity. 

Launched on May 31 by Singapore-based company All the Worlds Entertainment, Starcount lets users of 11 social media platforms — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Orkut, Renren, Tencent Weibo, Sina Weibo, Youku, Mixi and Vkontakte — pick their favorite people on those platforms. Starcount users can choose fun, insightful or influential individuals in many fields, including fashion, film, music, sports, gaming, TV, brands and politics. 

The chart can be accessed from any desktop on www.starcount.com, but it’s also available as a free application on Apple iOS devices. Starcount is touting the fact that although it is a global chart, it also gives a nod to popular users in specific countries. Browsing around the website, you can discover who’s currently popular in Singapore, Indonesia, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, the United States and many other countries. Users can even combine the geography and field of work categories, allowing them to keep tabs on social media “stars” across a wide range of disciplines. 

The system took two years to prepare, according to Drew Thomson, joint chief executive for All The Worlds Entertainment. 

“And the chart is changing every day,” Thomson said. “Every day you can discover someone new.” 

The company has bigger plans than just keeping track of who’s hot on Facebook at any given moment, though. Starcount hopes to create a new type of awards show based on honoring social media’s brightest. The inaugural Social Star Awards are already being planned for Singapore sometime in the near future. The company will invite the most popular people on social media to a gala awards ceremony similar to the Grammys or Oscars. 

Joint chief executive Paul Morrison said the event will be a multi-genre show that will include the top fans who helped their favorite personalities reach the highest rank on the charts. 

It could be an idea whose time has come, if outside interest is any gauge. Morrison said the company had already scored a content partnership with BBC Worldwide, which has agreed to broadcast the event. 

So far, Starcount is serious about reaching voters from other countries. Its website is currently available in English, Russian and Chinese, with Portuguese, Hindi and Spanish in the works.

Present Continuous Tenses =
Penghargaan Bintang perdana Sosial sudah sedang direncanakan untuk Singapura suatu saat dalam waktu dekat. Perusahaan ini akan mengundang orang yang paling populer di media sosial untuk upacara penghargaan gala mirip dengan Grammy atau Oscar.