Show of strength

摘要

Jamaica's commercial banking sector has fully recovered from the financial hurricane that struck the financial sector in the mid-1990s, according to the latest statistics from the Bank of Jamaica. At the end of 2007, for the first year since Jamaica's financial crisis began, the share of loans as a percentage of banks' total assets, at 39.4%, exceeded commercial banks' securities holdings of 34.3%, down from 38.8% in 2006. In the year to December 2007, growth in the commercial banks' stock of loans had accelerated significantly by 27.5% to a total of more than J$192bn ($2.7bn), from a much lower growth rate of just 16.5% in 2006. Even measured in real terms after inflation, loan growth accelerated by 16.4% in 2007 compared with only 6.4% in 2006. This growth was driven by an expansion in personal loans, as well as a strong increase in commercial lending, particularly for the expanding tourism sector.