Worse Than Japan?

摘要

There is one consolation for the depressing instability of finance. History offers a rich array of banking crises from which policymakers can draw lessons-and against which today's rescue plans can be judged. According to an IMF database, there have been124 "systemic" banking crises since 1970-episodes in which bad debts soared across the economy and much of the banking sector was insolvent. Most of those were in the developing world. But the list also includes half a dozen rich-country crashes, from Japan's slump after its property bubble burst in the late 1980s, to the Nordic bank crises in the early 1990s. All involved deep recessions, required massive government intervention to clean up bust banks, and led to big increases in public debt as economies shrank while government spending soared. But the speed of recovery differed dramatically; Japan endured a decade of economic stagnation, whereas South Korea returned to growth within two years of its 1997 banking disaster.