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THE end is still not in sight for the damaging fallout from the United States sub-prime mortgage crisis, veteran banker Wee Cho Yaw warned on Monday.
The chairman of United Overseas Bank (UOB) expects the crisis to take one to two years to stabilise. He said he was frightened that the extent of the losses was hard to assess even now.
The crisis has battered global equity markets for months, sparking a major credit squeeze. Vast numbers of US mortgage borrowers with low incomes and poor credit ratings defaulted on loans they had little hope of repaying.
Much of this debt had been converted into complex securities and sold to major banks, for instance - which then suffered massive losses. Some observers fear more write-downs are coming.
Mr Wee, 79, made the comments as he received an honorary Doctor of Letters from the National University of Singapore (NUS) on Monday.
Read the full story in Tuesday's edition of The Straits Times
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