Slovenia’s banks need 4.8 billion euros ($6.62 billion) to plug the holes in their balance sheets, the central bank said on Thursday, a sum the country can probably scrape together without having to ask its euro zone peers for a bailout.
Banks in Slovenia are saddled with an estimated 7.9 billion euros in bad loans — equivalent to a fifth of national output — after the global economic slowdown exposed their poor lending practices and tangled ownership structure.
At stake in Slovenia is whether the euro zone as a whole can say with confidence it is emerging from the convulsions of the past five years, or whether it still risks slipping back into the kind of crises that hit Greece, Ireland and Cyprus.
