*Austrian Banks Facing Payback as Hungary’s $22 Billion Debt Slaves Revolt*<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-13/austrian-banks-facing-payback-as-hungary-s-debt-slaves-revolt.html>, http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2011/12/december-18-2011-2012-end-and-... *When Hungary’s former central bank governor was buying a house two months before Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapsed and the country sought an emergency bailout, he received an offer he couldn’t refuse. Peter Akos Bod, now an economics professor at Corvinus University in Budapest, was given a choice of mortgages by his bank. The 60 year-old could select a loan in Hungary’s currency, the forint, at 13 percent interest, or one in Swiss francs at less than 6 percent. After crunching the numbers on a spreadsheet, he picked the cheaper franc loan. "It was rational," he said of his 2008 decision in an interview in the Hungarian capital. "I put it into a model." Three years later, Bod and about one million compatriots who took mortgages in francs are faced with a debt pile that has swelled to 4.9 trillion forint ($22 billion). The currency’s 40 percent slump against the franc has raised repayment costs, pushing mortgage arrears to a two-decade high and prompting Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government to brand the loans "debt slavery." To help homeowners, Orban imposed currency losses on banks including Erste Group Bank AG and Raiffeisen Bank International AG (RBI) that may total 900 million euros ($1.2 billion), according to Cristina Marzea, an analyst at Barclays Capital. Faced with the risk Orban would impose further measures, lenders have offered to accept $2.2 billion of additional losses if the government promised to take no further action. If it doesn’t, banks are threatening they may withdraw from the country. 'Too Risky' "Against the backdrop of a potential western European financial crisis, this raises the risk that western lenders will just pull out of Hungary because it’s just too risky, which would be disastrous," Neil Shearing, senior emerging markets analyst at Capital Economics Ltd. in London, said in an interview. "Hungarian banks are incredibly dependent on their western European parents for short-term credit lines. At the very least it means credit is going to remain very tight." Six of Hungary’s seven biggest banks have foreign parents, including Italy’s Intesa Sanpaolo SpA and UniCredit SpA (UCG) and Germany’s BayernLB. Only OTP Bank Nyrt., the country’s largest lender, is still domestically owned. 'Free of Debt' Almost 18 months after Orban was elected in April 2010, he passed a law allowing Hungarians to repay mortgages denominated in foreign currencies at discount of about 25 percent to today’s exchange rate. As long as a client applies before Dec. 31 and repays the entire loan before Feb. 28, the banks have to make up the difference. "I paid it back last week," Bod said. "I’m free of debt slavery," said the former industry minister. The plan "is easy to explain from a political viewpoint. It’s cheap for the government, expensive for the banks, good for voters."* -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens