Purpose: The study assessed the performances of Ghanaian banks in terms of their liquidity, solvency and profitability by applying financial ratios on the published audited financial statements and further predicted the bankruptcy of the selected banks with the application of Altman Z-model for selected banks in Ghana Stock Exchange. Methodology: Data gathered was analyzed using liquidity, leverage and profitability ratios as well as Altman Z-score. Current ratio and quick ratio were used to assess the liquidity of the banks. Additionally, debt to asset ratio and debt to equity ratio were utilized to find out the solvency of the banks. Whereas, return on assets and return on equity were employed to examine the profitability of the banks. Finally, working capital to assets, retained earnings to assets, earnings before tax to assets and market value of equity to liabilities were the ratios employed to determine the Z-scores. Results: Findings revealed that the liquid positions of the banks were below expectations. As far as the solvency positions of the banks were concerned, findings revealed the sector is highly leveraged. Analysis of the profitability position showed that the banks are fairly profitable as their profit averages were above that of the industry. Again, the Altman Z-score model revealed that all the selected banks except one were in corporate distress and far below the standard ratio to be in safe zone and thus, were likely to declare bankrupt.

International trade is the exchange of capital, goods, and services across international borders or territories, which could involve the activities of the government and individual. In Africa and Ghana to be specific, it is through international trade that items like automobiles, mobile phones, and other sophisticated machines are acquired. Along the West African belt, trade has been very key in the lives of the individual. However, different languages are used across the West African sub-region. Major amongst these languages are French, English, Twi , Hausa, and Ewe. The success of traders in the sub-region depends greatly on their ability to communicate either in written or oral form one of the aforementioned languages. Due to this barrier traders usually resort to interpreters to aid their trading activities. Meanwhile, these interpreters are not benevolent organizations-they also work at a

Credit Risk Management of Savings and Loans Companies in Ghana 1. Introductions According to Kliestik and Cug (2015) credit risk constitutes the loss probability that a financial institution encounters when a borrower fails to meet his contractual obligation. Largely, financial institutions are the most susceptible when it comes credit risk (Spuchľaková & Cúg, 2014) since it constitutes a significant portion of their operational losses (Klieštik & Cúg, 2015). As indicated by Bartošová (2005)credit risk does not only becomes imminent during loans approval, it equally occurs during other banking transactions such as when trading on the capital market, dealing with foreign exchanges, futures, swaps, bonds, options, stocks, etc. Clearly, this suggests that credit risk constitutes a significant portion of banking activities. Specifically, how the Ghanaian financial institutions operate make their operation more vulnerable to credit risk issues. For instance, for five consecutive years (i.e. 2012-2016) loans and advances have remained as the main source of the industry's operating assets (PwC, 2017). Moreover, most of these financial institutions rely on customers' deposits before they are able to advance credits to their customers for income. For example, recent figures by the regulator confirmed this claim as their statistics revealed that banks total deposits funded 62.5 percent of the industry's assets in December 2017 compared with 63.6 percent in December 2016 (Bank of Ghana, 2018). The consequential effect of this structural arrangement is that banks will have to pay significant amount of interest to their depositors before they acquire their savings. As rightly indicated in the recent Ghana Banking Survey report, interest expense on deposits constituted 75% of total interest expenses of the banking industry (PwC, 2017). This means that Ghanaian financial institutions may require stringent and effective credit risk management practices since they acquire most of their funds from customers' deposits and likewise rely on loans and advances as their major source of income.

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This study extends the capital-based macroeconomic theory to include international capital flow thus extending it to an open economy and analyze it in the context of the BFH system, Free banking system and 100 per cent reserve ratio. In all these, it was noticed that interest rate would barely change even though the possibility of interest rate changes was not ruled out completely. A test of these systems was conducted on Latvia, Lithuanian, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan and was successful. However, it must be noted that these are just proposition as these systems are not in place at the moment. In furtherance to this, past and present monetary system used by the countries exhibited similarities to these systems, even though difference could largely be seen.