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Английский язык в Челябинске

Banking and Lending Business environment is changing rapidly and banks must seize the new market opportunities created by new technology or national deregulation or economic globalisation. Borrowing and lending has become a fairly well-understood line of business, and a fairly well-managed one most of the time in most of the world. It is the banks themselves that are volatile, shifting shapes and strategies as furiously as their regulators will allow them in their efforts to win markets and market share. The way in which a bank is organized and operates is determined by its objectives. Most countries have a central bank - a national bank that provides financial and banking services for its country's government and commercial banking system, implements the government's monetary policy and issues currency. A group of countries which have a common currency may share a central bank (for example, the European Central Bank for Eurozone). The central bank acts as banker to the commercial banks and supervises and regulates not only the banking system but also the financial sector. It fixes the minimum interest rate and influences exchange rates. It collects financial data and publishes statistics, and provides financial information for consumers. As banker to the government it takes responsibility for the control of the money supply and the funding of the government’s budget deficit. There are three most important instruments through which the Bank might seek to affect the money supply: reserve requirements, the discount rate, and open market operations. As a commercial bank can lend most of the money deposited with it to other borrowers, who in turn may lend it to another borrower, each sum of money deposited in a bank is multiplied several times. To ensure the safety of the banking system, central banks impose reserve requirements, obliging commercial banks to deposit a certain amount of money with the central bank at zero interest. If a reserve requirement is in force, commercial banks can hold more than the required cash reserves but they cannot hold less. If their cash falls below the required amount, they must immediately borrow cash, usually from the central bank, to restore their required reserve ratio. The discount rate is the interest rate that the Bank charges when the commercial banks want to borrow money. An open market operation occurs when the central bank alters the monetary base by buying or selling financial securities in the open market. Since banks have insufficient reserves to meet a simultaneous withdrawal of all their deposits, any hint of large withdrawals is likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy as people scramble to get their money out before the banks go bust. To avoid financial panics, it is necessary to ensure that people believe that banks can never get into trouble in the first place. There must be a guarantee that banks can get cash if they really need it. And there is only one institution that can manufacture cash in indefinite quantities: the central bank. The threat of financial panics can be avoided, or at least greatly diminished, if it is known that the central bank stands ready to act as a lender of last resort. Commercial banks are businesses that trade in money. They provide and develop services that can be sold at a price that will yield a profit. They are financial intermediaries with a government license to make loans and provide deposits, including deposits against which cheques can be written; they pay money according to customers’ instructions, offer investment advice, foreign exchange facilities, and so on. Commercial banks offer large-scale services to companies, government agencies, other banks (wholesale banking) and smaller-scale services to the general public (retail banking). The major functions of both types of banking are: • deposits • payments • credits In the UK, the commercial banking system comprises registered banks, the National Girobank operating through post offices (Giro is a system of electronic credit transfer used in Europe and Japan, involving banks, post offices, and public utilities), and about a dozen trustee savings banks. Another important single group is the London clearing banks. The clearing banks are the main banks in Britain that are part of a network of banks that can clear checks for their clients regardless of whether or not the check originates from the same commercial bank. In some European countries, notably Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, there are universal banks which combine deposit and loan banking with share and bond dealing, investment advice, etc. Yet even universal banks usually form a subsidiary, known as a finance house, to lend money – at several per cent over the base lending rate – for hire purchase or instalment credit, that is, loans to consumers that are repaid in regular, equal monthly amounts. In Britain, the USA and Japan, however, there is, or used to be a strict separation between commercial banks and banks that do stockbroking or bond dealing. Thus in Britain, merchant banks specialize in raising