Republic Bank’s profits fall
The bank made an after tax profit of $741 which was 20 per cent less than what it made last year. The bank blames the international recession.
Poor Republic Bank.
For the nine-month period which ended on June 30, the bank made after tax profits of only $741.3 million which was 20 per cent less than for the comparative period last year although profits from core operations amounted to $1.2 billion, This represented a six per cent increase over the comparative period last year.
Chairman Ronald Harford, in his chairman’s report, explains:
“The current worldwide economic downturn has negatively impacted all the economies in which we operate. This in turn has affected the performance of some of our customers and hence our provisioning.”
Currently, the banking system is very liquid: people are not borrowing and this trend may very well continue despite Prime Minister Patrick Manning’s advice to citizen to “loosen your belts”.
At the beginning of the year, the banks had increased credit card rates to 25 per cent but have been forced to cut these rates as well as prime lending rates but the empirical evidence shows that there are few takers.