Cash-rich Swedish banks are ready for Baltic boom, Bloomberg wrote last week.

Four years after being dragged through the Baltic region's property bust, Sweden's banks are ready to expand in the former Soviet countries, this time with surplus cash that far exceeds their regulator's requirements.

"It's good news for the Baltics that the Scandinavian banks are in such good shape," Maris Mancinskis, chief executive officer of Swedbank AB's Latvian unit, said in a Feb 26 interview in Riga.
Advertisement

"That strength allows us to do investments and the acquisitions we did last year. We have the capital and the capacity to do so - we can invest when others have to beef up their capital."

Sweden's banks are now reaping the benefits of sitting out the 2009 crisis that plunged Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia into the deepest recessions seen in the European Union.

Latvia's economic contraction, which followed a boom cycle triggered by its 2004 EU accession, deepened to a record 18 percent in 2009.

Yet the successful deployment of austerity measures helped restore growth to more than 5 per cent last year, trouncing the average in the rest of Europe.