Title: Lost Decade (Japan) - Wikipedia
Headings: Lost Decade (Japan)
Lost Decade (Japan)
Contents
Causes
Effects
Interpretation
Legacy
See also
References
Further reading

Content: In doing so they helped inflate the bubble economy to grotesque proportions." Nikkei 225 annual closing price saw the price sliding from 1990 onwards
Trying to deflate speculation and keep inflation in check, the Bank of Japan sharply raised inter-bank lending rates in late 1989. This sharp policy caused the bursting of the bubble, and the Japanese stock market crashed. Equity and asset prices fell, leaving overly-leveraged Japanese banks and insurance companies with books full of bad debt. The financial institutions were bailed out through capital infusions from the government, loans and cheap credit from the central bank, and the ability to postpone the recognition of losses, ultimately turning them into zombie banks. Yalman Onaran of Bloomberg News writing in Salon stated that the zombie banks were one of the reasons for the following long stagnation. Additionally Michael Schuman of Time magazine wrote that these banks kept injecting new funds into unprofitable " zombie firms " to keep them afloat, arguing that they were too big to fail. However, most of these companies were too debt-ridden to do much more than survive on bail-out funds. Schuman believed that Japan's economy did not begin to recover until this practice had ended. Eventually, many of these failing firms became unsustainable, and a wave of consolidation took place, resulting in four national banks in Japan.