REGULATORS IN the US and Europe could use Japan’s success in recapitalising its banks to quell outrage over the use of public funds to bail out their struggling financial institutions, Japan’s top financial regulator said yesterday.
The Japanese government made profits of more than Y2,000 billion (€15 billion) on the Y8,600 billion in public funds it injected into Japanese banks during the country’s banking crisis, according to financial services agency commissioner Takafumi Sato.
“So, that was a good business in retrospect,” he told an audience in Tokyo. “The fact that the Japanese authorities made a good business out of this whole operation could be used to persuade the people that the use of public money is not to save the individual banks but to save the financial system as a whole. If our fellow regulators use it that way, we would be very happy.”
The Japanese government faced an outcry in the late 1990s when it injected public funds into 22 banks. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009)
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/VR3765MFOBH2NMV2QNICYDF67M.png)