FT: Poland can learn from Hungary bank truce

This week seems to have provided yet more evidence of the free market being under threat in Poland and Hungary — countries long seen as among Europe’s most successful post-communist reformers, the UK daily The Financial Times wrote. On Monday, Jarosław Gowin, Poland’s deputy prime minister, told the Financial Times that Warsaw’s new conservative government should renationalise foreign-owned banks to reduce the dominance of foreign capital that developed in the 1990s. His remarks came soon after economy minister Mateusz Morawiecki signalled an end to Poland’s previous laissez-faire approach to capitalism. Later that same day, it was announced that Hungary’s government and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development had signed a long-awaited deal whereby each buys a 15 percent stake in Erste Bank Hungary, a subsidiary of Austria’s Erste Group. "With Poland now contemplating how to increase state ownership of its banking sector, it would do well to study this Hungarian example — and the reasons why the Erste deal happened," the newspaper argued.