The Hungarian Horntail

BBC reports: Hungarians feel force of economic storm.

Everyone in Hungary seems to be crying out for help.

Where is the money to come from now that the easy credit that fuelled Hungary's good times has disappeared?

German and Austrian banks are nervously eyeing their indebted Hungarian subsidiaries.

When easy capital swirled around the world, the governments and citizens of central and eastern Europe were a fine sales opportunity.

Now, things are very different. Hungary has been left with a towering debt to GDP ratio.

Borrowing its way out of this situation is impossible.

And its debt burden has made international exchanges worry about - and heavily sell - the national currency, the forint.

Which wouldn't be the end of the world - a cheap currency can boost exports - but for the fact that Hungary has an awful lot of of foreign currency loans to pay back.

Everyone - including the former central bank governor - seems to have a mortgage in Swiss francs.

And as the value of the forint has fallen, day after day, so the cost of a Swiss franc-backed mortgage has risen.

All this has left Janos Keller, 51, high and dry.

His day job as a restaurant maintenance worker was never going to make him rich.

Nor does his hobby of building and repairing stereo equipment; the small desk in his very small apartment in a block off one of Budapest's bigger highways is littered with spare parts and soldering equipment.

His monthly mortgage bills - a 100% mortgage in Swiss francs - have more than tripled since he started repayment at the height of the forint's strength back in the summer of 2008.

The bill is greater than his entire post tax monthly salary.

Didn't he know? Wasn't he warned? His reply is a sad, self deprecating monotone:

"I'm not an expert on these things. I think I wasn't warned and informed well enough by the bank."

Next up: Polish sausage. Mmmmm, mmmmm, you know you want some!