A decade ago, when I worked as a reporter in Tokyo, I worried about Asian zombies. For when the Japanese banks tipped into crisis in the late 1990s, scores of companies were cast into an “undead” state – in the sense of being too weak to flourish, but too complex and costly for their lenders to shut down.

Hence they remained half-alive, poisoning the corporate world by silently spreading a sense of stagnation and fear.