Japan's Zombie Banks Repaid Bailout Money
By wchung | 21 Apr, 2025

Japan recouped most of the public money it pumped into banks during the country’s financial crisis last decade, when toxic loans totaled as much as $1 trillion, a top regulator said Wednesday.

Japan endured an economic and financial malaise in the 1990s known as the “lost decade” after a real estate bubble, built on excessive lending, burst. Insolvent lenders propped up by government bailouts became known as “zombie” banks, and cast a long shadow over the world’s second-largest economy.

The banking system of the 1990s was burdened with 90 trillion yen ($930 billion) to 100 trillion yen ($1 trillion) of bad loans, Financial Services Agency Commissioner Takafumi Sato said Wednesday at the Foreign Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Tokyo.

Banks have repaid 8.45 trillion yen of the 9.6 trillion yen of public money injected into the financial system during the troubled decade. “That was good business in retrospect,” Sato said.

Reflecting the views of other Japanese officials and analysts, Sato said that what Japan underwent offers lessons for the global financial crisis unfolding today, including the need for public money to prop up weakened banks.

“We have argued that Japan’s experience in the 1990s provides useful suggestions as to how our fellow regulators should respond to the ongoing difficulties,” he said.

Japan’s experience also shows how critical it is to remove toxic assets from bank balance sheets, Sato said, adding that such measures weren’t about saving individual banks but about preserving the health of the financial system.

In giving the estimate of nonperforming loans, Sato acknowledged it had been difficult to get a proper assessment of the bad loan damage in Japan while financial markets were in turmoil.

Sato said the exposure of Japanese financial institutions to the latest crisis was minimal, partly because they weren’t “innovative,” and hadn’t invested in what turned out to be risky securities.

The danger for the banks now is the hobbled economy because they hold shares in Japanese companies in what are called “cross-shareholdings,” he said.

Japan’s top banks sank into the red for the fiscal year ended March because of losses on such stock holdings.

6/17/2009 3:12 AM YURI KAGEYAMA AP Business Writer TOKYO