EFFECTS OF THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS IN THE BANKING SYSTEM OF KOSOVO

Financial crises are phenomena that happened before and continue to happen even nowadays. There were many financial crises in the last century, starting with the Great Depression of 1929 and continuing with other financial crisis, and it was believed that people would learn from their previous experiences and would not allow the crisis to happen again. But the financial crisis of 2007, created the impression that no one wanted to learn for the real causes of their occurrence and consequences, often disastrous for countries and the globe, and as such allowed the crisis to be repeated. Effects of the 2007 financial crisis, which originally started in the USA’s mortgage market and which was quickly spread all over the world, even to this date it still continues to have effect on real economies of many states, e.g. Greece. The spread of the crisis was primarily due to globalization and commercial trades among countries. Be-cause of the dependence of economies on one another it was created the domino effect and all the countries were affected from the crisis. As a result, the crisis seems to have revealed the disadvantages of globalization. Finances of the world were shocked and rapid fluctuations were reflected in the stock prices. Kosovo, as a new and small country in the Western Balkans is not much globalized and open which was beneficial in preventing it from being affected from the global financial crisis. Its economy has slightly felt the effect of the crisis because the banking system in Kosovo is not much open to the international financial markets as they operate mostly with their clients’ deposits. The purpose of this research is to assess the implications of the global financial crisis in the banking system of Kosovo, and also to identify the measures that the Central Bank and the Government should undertake in order to protect the economy from external implications.