Creditor countries such as Germany are understandably reluctant to have their taxpayers cough up for the mistakes of bank supervisors abroad.
"My mistake and the mistake of the banks was to vastly underestimate the risk," Mr. Kordez, 56, said in a recent interview at his home near the picturesque town of Bled, with a view of Slovenia's highest peak.
Its big mistake was that of banks and regulators across the world - it had been lulled by the passage of so many years of prosperity into believing that financial stability was the natural and permanent condition, that a full-blown banking crisis was the most unlikely of risks facing the country and world.
Vehemently focused on preventing deflation, the Federal Reserve, Bush's silent partner, is making the classic central banking mistake of fighting the last war.
"Banks have a habit of making mistakes," said Henry T. C. Hu, a professor of banking and finance law at the University of Texas.
Senator Paul Wellstone, Democrat of Minnesota, said that Congress had "seemed determined to unlearn the lessons from our past mistakes".. "Scores of banks failed in the Great Depression as a result of unsound banking practices, and their failure only deepened the crisis," Mr. Wellstone said.
"It's the biggest, even strategic mistake of the Ukrainian authorities to bank on a military solution to the crisis," Interfax quoted Russia's deputy foreign minister, Grigory Karasin, as saying.
For all of the success of German firms in exporting goods, some German banks made the mistake of buying American mortgage debts.
"Alternatively, if the Bank makes the mistake of viewing safeguards as an afterthought rather than an integral part of the solution, it might reduce the numbers or authority of its safeguard specialists and increase the risks of harm to the poor and vulnerable".
"The irony of history is that the biggest defenders of banking secrecy then offered on a silver plate the abolition of that secrecy through their own mistakes".
