Oct 9, 2025
#MarkoArnautović becomes #Austria's all time highest goalscorer
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#MarkoArnautović becomes #Austria's all time highest goalscorer
🇦🇹 NEW EPISODE 🇦🇹 It's officially the pre-season for #Eurovision 2026 and we have a lot of news to get caught up on. We're heading to Vienna in May and planning for the national final season is underway. We also review #Austria's CV at the Contest
It's offficially the pre-season for Eurovision 2026 and we have a lot of news to get caught up on. We're heading to Vienna in May and planning for the national final season is underway. We also review Austria's CV at Eurovision.
this is a nice song, I like it.
New Post has been published on News From Banks | Banking and Investment Blog
New Post has been published on http://www.newsfrombanks.com/austrias-central-bank-to-repatriate-3-5bn-of-gold-reserves-from-uk.html
Austria's central bank to repatriate £3.5bn of gold reserves from UK
Austria’s central bank plans to repatriate £3.5bn of its gold reserves currently stored in Britain – amounting to 80% of its entire stocks – after auditors warned against the risks of keeping a majority in a foreign country.
The Austrian National Bank will spend the next five years flying gold bars back to Vienna to raise its own stocks to half the total of 280 tonnes.
The move echoes Germany’s plan in 2013 to repatriate all of its gold stocked in France as well as some of the reserves held in the United States, to ensure at least 50% was kept on German soil by 2020.
Until now the Austrian National Bank has relied on the Bank of England to watch over most of its £6.7bn gold reserves. The BoE looks after much of the world’s gold as most central banks send some of the stocks to London for safekeeping.
Now the BoE’s stock of the precious metal will be reduced to 30%, while Austria will hold 50% and Switzerland 20%.
The Austrian authorities appeared to be conscious of the perils of bulk-storing gold in the manner of Fort Knox in the US, made famous by Auric Goldfinger’s attempted heist in the third James Bond film.
The fictional villain seeks to corner the gold market in his position as treasurer of Smersh, the arch enemy of MI6. However, the decision was taken earlier this year, before the Hatton Garden robbery which saw millions of pounds of precious metals and jewels stolen and resulted in mass arrests earlier this month.
The central bank shifted its position after a report by the Austrian court of audit in February, which warned of a “heightened concentration risk” linked to storing the majority of its reserves in Britain.
At the time, the bank had argued that the policy was warranted because London was a major international centre for the gold trade. London’s bullion market is the largest in the world and attracts buyers from Europe, Asia, Africa and US.
Transport of the bullion is likely to be arranged with one of the four main security firms listed by the London Bullion Market – Brink’s, G4S, Malca-Amit Commodities and VIA-MAT, most of which operate out of business units near Heathrow airport.
It is likely the bars will be flown out of the country in five-tonne batches, on specially commissioned and heavily guarded planes.
Vienna confirmed that it would begin to repatriate 92.4 tonnes this summer. A further 47.6 tonnes will be transferred from Britain to Switzerland.
Last year Swiss voters rejected a proposal to force the central bank to bring back gold reserves from Britain and Canada.
New Post has been published on News From Banks | Banking and Investment Blog
New Post has been published on http://www.newsfrombanks.com/the-traumatic-restructuring-of-austrias-cooperative-banking-system.html
The Traumatic Restructuring Of Austria's Cooperative Banking System
Austria’s banking system is undergoing traumatic restructuring. This has been forced upon it by the legacy of the financial crisis and by the progressive removal of sovereign and sub-sovereign guarantees to comply with EU legislation. So far, we have seen the failures of Hypo Alpe Adria and its “bad bank” Heta, the forced rescue of Pfandbriefbank by its regional bank owners, some of which in turn will probably need rescuing by their provincial governments, and the forcible sale of Eastern European assets by Raffeisenbank and Erste Bank. The first of these is still suffering terrible losses: the second says it is slowly returning to profit. We shall see.
The latest domino to fall is Austria’s system of cooperative banks, the Volksbanken. There are about 40 Volksbanken, which collectively own an “umbrella bank”, Volksbank Volksbank AG, known as VBAG.
VBAG was originally created as a central clearing “hub” for its Volksbanken member-owners. It became a private limited company in 1974 and a commercial bank in 1991, after which it developed a life of its own, lending on its own account and acquiring interests not only within Austria but in Central and Eastern Europe. It rapidly built up a substantial portfolio of risky assets backed by insufficient equity.
In the 2007-8 financial crisis in Europe, VBAG was initially damaged by the failure of Austria’s infrastructure bank Kommunalkredit AG, in which VBAG had a 50.78% stake: the other principal shareholder was the Belgian/French bank Dexia Dexia. VBAG’s stake in Kommunalkredit AG was bought by the Austrian Federal Government in November 2008 for a symbolic 1 euro, forcing VBAG to realize a loss of 420,000 EUR. Dexia suffered a similar fate.
But worse was to come. Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) was badly affected by the 2008 financial crisis. As investors spooked by the turmoil in the markets moved money to safe havens, several CEE countries slid into deep recession: the worst affected were Romania, Hungary and Latvia, all of which required EU/IMF IMF assistance. Banks exposed to CEE suffered collapsing asset values and destruction of shareholder value. VBAG was one of the worst hit. It lost 1.1bn EUR in 2009 due to losses on CEE loans and real estate. It was bailed out by the Austrian federal government, which provided it with 1bn EUR of subordinated debt.
Significant restructuring followed. In 2010, VBAG sold its troubled real estate arm Europolis to the Austrian real estate company CA CA Immobilien Anlagen AG. It also sold its 25% stake in Victoria Volksbank Versicherung to ERGO insurance. After considerable negotiations, most of VBAG’s CEE assets were sold to the Russian bank Sberbank in 2012 at a much reduced price, though VBAG’s loss-making Romanian arm was not included in the transaction.
Despite this, however, VBAG continued to make losses. In 2011 it lost 1.3bn EUR due to writedowns on Greek debt and further losses on its CEE assets and in its corporate finance subsidiary Investkredit AG. VBAG’s capital was written down by 70%. It was part-nationalized by means of a debt-equity conversion of 250m EUR of the Austrian federal government’s subordinated debt holding: its Volksbanken member-owners contributed a further 234m EUR.
Since then, VBAG has reduced its asset base from 41.1bn Euros to 15.9bn EUR, an astonishing drop. But it is still insolvent. In May 2014, Moody’s downgraded VBAG to one notch above junk, and also took the unusual step of warning that the whole Volksbanken network – which Moody’s does not rate – would need more capital. But further support from the Austrian federal government was not forthcoming. In October 2014, pre-empting expected failure of the ECB/EBA stress tests, VBAG announced that it would break itself up.
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