Despite downtown Budapest's patina of wealth, a good number of Hungarians are broke or close to it; as the forint weakens, many homeowners have been struggling to repay foreign-currency denominated loans contracted before the global slump began in 2008.
First, a dollar- denominated agricultural loan from the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture's Commodity Credit Corp. was defaulted upon.
The segment includes Turkish Lira and foreign currency denominated working capital loans, small business loans, medium-term financing for investments, foreign trade financing, letters of credit and guarantee, foreign currency trading, corporate finance services, and cash and deposit management services.
Yet for many borrowers, the benefits of a loan denominated in euros are still compelling.
For Laos to undertake such an enormous loan denominated in China's currency might even be enough to persuade the country to peg its currency to the yuan.
An American company looking to expand overseas might borrow a loan denominated in US dollars.
The Dallas hedge fund manager (no relation to the famous Bass family of Fort Worth) is so convinced the Japanese government's profligate spending will drive the nation to the brink of default that he financed his home with a five-year loan denominated in yen, which he hopes will be cheaper to pay back than dollars.
One woman, he recounts, was so overwhelmed when the monthly mortgage bill on her Japanese yen-denominated loan from OTP suddenly soared 50percentthatat she ingested a dose of rat poison and narrowly escaped death.
With volunteers too busy to answer the phone, many of those looking for help come in person — like Istvan Rakitovszky, 46, a construction worker who was laid off last fall and can no longer pay his Swiss franc-denominated loan from Raiffeisen Bank, a large Austrian-based bank.
Suez lost a bundle in Asia's third-most-populous nation, Indonesia, when it built a water treatment facility financed with a dollar-denominated loan.
Suez built a water treatment plant financed with a dollar-denominated loan in Indonesia but was unable to cover its debt when Jakarta devalued the Indonesian rupiah during the Asian financial crisis.
