Edward Hugh, usually in the business of writing scary articels about some place else, is writing about us:

Austrian Banks The Most Exposed To Eastern Europe Forex Lending
by Edward Hugh

Bloomberg are reporting (via Der Standard) that Austrian banks have the biggest exposure to Forex lending in Eastern Europe. This is hardly breaking news, and I have had working notes for a post on this lying around for months (here, please excuse the mess, I will append some of this to this post if time permits at the weekend). The issue is simply finding the time to do everything. Basically I would say that all this business about not devaluing currencies (and hence imposing wage cuts) in Eastern Europe is to do with this issue (also highly exposed are the Swedish banks, and Italy’s Unicredit). Der Standard cite an as yet unpublished International Monetary Fund report to the effect that Austrian banks have loans outstanding in Eastern Europe equal to about 70 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, a higher percentage exposure than any other country.

If you are in the business of liking scary quotes, you could try this one (which comes from the king of scary quotes and dreaded anthropologist’s grandson - Ambrose Evans Pritchard - but that doesn’t make it any less scary:

“This is the biggest currency crisis the world has ever seen,” said Neil Mellor, a strategist at Bank of New York Mellon. Experts fear the mayhem may soon trigger a chain reaction within the eurozone itself. The risk is a surge in capital flight from Austria – the country, as it happens, that set off the global banking collapse of May 1931 when Credit-Anstalt went down – and from a string of Club Med countries that rely on foreign funding to cover huge current account deficits.