Finnish banks have ridden a strong boom since the country’s banking crash in the early 1990s, and the global credit squeeze looks unlikely to change that. The earlier financial crisis may have immunised Finnish banks against the current global disease.
The banking sector crash was part of a broader economic crisis caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union, which until that time had been the main Finnish export market. Finnish gross domestic product (GDP) fell 13% between 1991 and 1993, and unemployment rocketed to 20% as many companies’ export market disappeared.
