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Ex-IMF economist: Large US bank collapse ahead

(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-08-20 09:19

Rogoff said multi-billion dollar investments by sovereign wealth funds from Asia and the Middle East in western financial firms may not necessarily result in large profits because they had not taken into account the broader market conditions that the industry faces.

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"There was this view early on in the crisis that sovereign wealth funds could save everybody. Investment banks did something stupid, they lost money in the sub-prime, they're great buys, sovereign wealth funds come in and make a lot of money by buying them.

"That view neglects the point that the financial system has become very bloated in size and needed to shrink," Rogoff told the conference in Singapore, whose wealth funds GIC and Temasek have invested billions in Merrill Lynch and Citigroup

In response to the sharp US housing retrenchment and turmoil in credit markets, the US Federal Reserve has reduced interest rates by a cumulative 3.25 percentage points to 2 percent since mid-September.

Rogoff said the US Federal Reserve was wrong to cut interest rates as "dramatically" as it did.

"Cutting interest rates is going to lead to a lot of inflation in the next few years in the United States."

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