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Country Risk Datapoints Of The Day

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by Felix Salmon
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Nov 05 2008 11:27am EDT

Country Risk Datapoints of the Day

Here's the kind of table most of us never thought we'd see, taken from Merrill Lynch's latest economics note:

countryrisk.jpg

The rankings are constructed by considering the biggest risk factors affecting countries today: current account financing gap, FX reserves/short-term external debt ratio, exports to-GDP ratio, private credit-to-GDP ratio, private credit growth, loans-to deposits ratio, and banks capital-to-assets ratio. And as you can see, the results seem to make Nigeria the safest country in the world, with Colombia, Egypt, and Russia also in the low-risk top 10. Meanwhile, Switzerland is the second-riskiest country in the world.

Which doesn't mean that you should move your private-banking assets to Nigeria, of course. But it does mean that the Swiss franc is no longer the safe-haven currency that it was for most of the 20th Century.

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