Banking, Commodities, Economics, Featured Work, Infrastructure, Mongolia - Monday, December 1, 2008 16:52 - 0 Comments

Why Mongolia must master its reticence in resources

Asiamoney, December 2008

You had to go a long way in September to find anyone who thought it was a good idea to launch a US$300 million debt programme. Specifically, you had to go to an upstairs side-room of the State Palace in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. In world capital market terms you can’t get much further off the beaten track than that.

Here, on September 10, Khan Bank CEO J Peter Morrow announced that his bank was growing so aggressively and successfully that it needed international funding to keep up. And if that seemed a contrarian sentiment at the time – this was the week Lehman Brothers’ share price began its final plunge towards bankruptcy – then Morrow certainly wasn’t alone. The following day ING, the sole lead on the global medium term note programme for Khan Bank, formally opened its first office in Ulaanbaatar. And that night, crowds of foreign bankers and investors were treated to a show of contortionists and throat singers at a party celebrating the launch of a whole new Mongolian investment bank, by Eurasia Capital Management, which earlier this year launched a Mongolia-dedicated fund.

To judge the mood in Ulaanbaatar, it was as if nobody had heard of the credit crunch or the crisis on Wall Street. So what’s so special about Mongolia? Continue…

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