Lessons learnt from the mounting non-performing loans in Japan after the 1990s

Abstract

When the property bubble burst in the 1990s, the corporate and banking sectors in Japan suffered from historically huge losses that resulted in a sluggish economy that lasted nearly 15 years. In 2002, the economy finally bottomed out. By going through this process, Japan learnt many lessons in the fields of economics, sociology, and politics. Two critical lessons that the financial authorities gleaned from this experience are: (1) Disclosure of the current conditions of financial institutions in the early stages is of the utmost importance. Once losses start to mount, disclosure and one-time compensation should trigger a systemic risk. (2) At times when a country is going through a strong economic period, it is important to make preparations for economic stagnation. To ensure that this is successful, the first step is for the public sector to share the understanding of the current economic conditions and the forecasts for its seeable future. It is also important that they disclose this knowledge to other authorities and people to ensure transparency. Those lessons are not so special, rather ordinary. But it is difficult to practice them. The mechanism of the bubble economy and how it burst is not clear yet in economics. But history shows such situations repeat themselves in different ways. In the process of globalisation, excess liquidity in the financial market is invested into too illiquid assets all over the world, especially in the emerging countries and real property market. To know what is happening is critical. But the domestic authorities who supervise financial institutions in the mother market face two difficulties to do it. Owing to the development of IT, the boundary between financial institutions and funds becomes vague and investment money will go freely over cross-border.