“Latvia may be a small country but it has vast repercussions.”52 One Central European minister of finance, who preferred to remain anonymous, predicted that the chain reaction across Central and Eastern Europe would take down at least half a dozen European banks. Latvia would play the role of a Lehman, or, even more ominously, that of the infamous Austrian Kreditanstalt in the financial crisis of 1931, the failure of which had precipitated Weimar Germany’s final slide toward disaster.
