“Now I would say that Lithuania is one of the [financially] strongest countries in Europe. If there were a shock, you have a very robust system,” Michael Wolf said at a meeting with Lithuania’s reporters on Thursday.
He noted that Lithuania’s households had not borrowed excessively and there were no problems comparable to the ones seen, for example, in the inflated mortgage market in Sweden.
Swedbank, the leading Lithuania’s commercial bank that is part of Sweden’s Swedbank group, saw its net earnings decline by 41.8 percent, to 174 million litas (EUR 50.4m), in the first half of this year, from 299 million litas in the same period last year. The bank said that its performance reflected stable growth of domestic economy. The bank had 1.382 million active customers in Lithuania at the end of June.
