Part II: Winners in banking and financial crisis

Declaration of bankruptcy from financial institutions and investment bankers was the obvious consequence of the banking and financial distress. The losers are easy to observe in this battle, however, there are winners who take advantage of the mess to seize their business.

Merger and acquisition has become cheaper and more attractive. Bank of America, the largest American retail bank acquired Merrill Lynch, one of the five largest investment banks. Due to the recession, Merrill Lynch had to face the illiquidity with a huge amount of debt which led to the drop in share price. The acquisition offers bank of America a huge opportunity to jump into the investment side of banking right in the 2007 recession with lower cost based on the strong established brand name. In addition, JP Morgan is also said to be better off by acquiring more than 2300 branches of Washington Mutual with only $USD 1.9bn. The trend is spread across Asia, Vietnam is no exception, many companies which still stay strong in the market during the crisis have merged and acquired smaller ones with a good deal. Another aspect is that when banks are bailed out, any institution that banks owed will be better off.

Developing countries are also better off from the baking and financial crisis. In some cases, those countries export commodity goods, such as oil, gas etc which its price has been increasing since the 2007 crisis is also better off. Manufacturing with low costs i.e low labour cost, cheap materials will be the winning point. Therefore, those developing countries can take advantage of this point to be recover faster from the financial crisis