Japan's Financial Services Agency, the banking regulator, yesterday declared that the bad-loan crisis, which has afflicted the country's largest banks for 16 years and helped trigger more than a decade of economic stagnation, was officially over.
Tatsuya Ito, financial services minister, said the FSA's target of getting the major banks to halve by March this year the percentage of non-performing loans to total loans compared with 2002 levels had been met, paving the way for the next phase of Japan's banking sector recovery.
