David Piling
26th October, 2008
Western banks may still not have produced reliable accounts of their balance sheets, suggesting more write-downs and capital injections could be necessary, according to Heizo Takenaka, the former Japanese economy minister often credited with ending the country’s 10-year banking crisis.
Mr Takenaka, who from 2001 forced banks aggressively to write down bad loans and to repair balance sheets by raising capital, said “more intellectual effort” was needed by western institutions to flush out the full extent of toxic assets. These were more complicated and harder to identify than in Japan’s more straightforward banking crisis, he said. Read the rest of this entry »
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