日本経済新聞夕刊 2002/11/14
４大銀の１つは来月にも国有化
奥田氏発言と英紙報道
１４日付の英紙タイムズは、日本の四大金融グループ「ビッグ４」のうち少なくとも１つが来月にも国有化されそうだ、と報じた。同紙によると、日本経団連の奥田碩会長が１３日に見通しを明らかにしたという。
同紙は、奥田会長がビッグ４は改革のプロセスの中で生き残るとの見通しを示しながらも、「問題は（生き残りの形が）私企業としてなのか、あるいは国有化されるかということだ。４つのうち２つは堅実だが、残る２つは非常に脆弱」と指摘した、と伝えている。
国有化発言ない 日本経団連が抗議
日本経済団体連合会は１４日「奥田碩日本経団連会長が四大銀行の国有化に言及した」とする同日付の英タイムズ紙の報道に対し「そのような発言の事実は一切ない。タイムズ紙に抗議し訂正を申し入れている」とのコメントを発表した。
奥田会長は１３日、海外メディアと会見。複数のメディアが会見を引用する形で報道した。同じ英国のフィナンシャル・タイムズ紙も「四大銀行のうちいくつかがぜい弱な状況にある」との奥田氏の発言を報道している。しかしフィナンシャル・タイムズ紙に関しては日本経団連は抗議声明を出していない。
The Times November 14,
2002
Japan poised to nationalise bank
From Anatole Kaletsky in Tokyo
AT LEAST one of Japan’s “big four”
banks is likely to
be forcibly nationalised next month, in a move that will cost
shareholders billions of pounds. The nationalisation will
probably be precipitated by a “symbolic”
bankruptcy of one of
Japan’s 30 most indebted companies before the
end of the year.
These stark predictions were made yesterday by Hiroshi Okuda,
chairman of the Keidanren, the powerful Japanese industrial
association, which includes the main banks among its members. Mr
Okuda, who is also chairman of Toyota, the world’s second
largest carmaker, suggested that the controversial move will
follow from the much tougher accounting standards, introduced on
October 30.
Mr Okuda seemed relaxed about the prospects of a large-scale bank
failure and expressed confidence that the Government would be
able to cope with the consequences without damaging the Japanese
economic recovery, which was confirmed by firmer than expected
GDP figures published yesterday.
Mr Okuda, whose organisation has been closely involved in the
Government’s contingency plans for a financial
crisis, said the Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, was now “strongly
supporting” major reform of the banking system.
Under reform plans published last month, Japanese banks would be
forced to make much more stringent provisions than in the past
for non-performing loans (NPLs) to insolvent and struggling
borrowers.
The total value of NPLs in the Japanese banking system is
generally thought to be at least Y50 trillion ($400 billion). If
the losses resulting from these new provisions reduced a bank’s
capital to below the level mandated by the Bank for International
Settlements (BIS), the Government would inject new capital and
take control. This process would amount to a forced
nationalisation, wiping out or massively diluting existing
shareholders.
Mr Okuda said that all of Japan’s “big four”
banks would survive
the reform process, but the question was “whether they will be privately
owned or nationalised”. He added ominously that “of the
four major banks two are very solid, but two are fragile”.
While Mr Okuda refused to identify the banks in these two groups,
analysts are virtually unanimous that the two “solid”
banks
are Mitsubishi Tokyo Financial and Sumitomo Mitsui, while the two
weaker institutions are UFJ Holdings and Mizuho Holdings, the world’s biggest bank in terms of
assets.
Asked to explain why the banking crunch could come as early as
next month, Mr Okuda explained that the rigorous new credit
assessment regime could quickly drive one or more big borrowers
into bankruptcy and this would threaten their bank lenders.
Business chief warns of
Japanese banks' frailty
By John Thornhill, Asia Editor, and David
Ibison in Tokyo
Hiroshi Okuda, chairman of the Japanese Business Federation,
which lobbies government on behalf of industry, warned yesterday
that two
of Japan's four largest banks would be in a "fragile"
state if the
so-called Takenaka plan was strictly implemented.
Mr Okuda said measures proposed by Heizo Takenaka, minister for
the economy and financial services, to resolve Japan's banking
crisis meant some of the big four could breach an 8 per cent
capital adequacy ratio limit set by the Bank for International
Settlements.
"If I am blunt, two [banks] are very solid but the other
two are fragile,"
he said.
Mr Okuda did not name the banks, but private sector analysts have
previously singled out Mizuho, the largest bank in the world in
terms of assets, and UFJ, Japan's fourth-largest bank, as the
weakest of the large lenders.
Mr Okuda's comments will serve as another blunt reminder to the
banks that they must take urgent action to avert a breach of the
BIS limit if they are to stand any chance of avoiding an
injection of public funds and partial nationalisation.
Under the Takenaka plan, this would involve a rapid move to
offload a sizeable number of bad loans to either the Resolution
and Collection Corporation or a new body, tentatively called the
Industrial Reconstruction Corporation.
Senior bankers at the four largest banks have sought to water
down Mr Takenaka's proposals, and at one point threatened to sue
him if they were implemented. However, they are under
unprecedented pressure from the office of Junichiro Koizumi, the
prime minister, to resolve the bad loan issue.
Standard & Poor's, the credit rating agency, yesterday
downgraded its equity investment ratings on all four banks,
Mizuho, MTFG, UFJ and SMBC, rating UFJ and Mizuho the lowest. It
said the more aggressive approach towards bad loans promised by
the Financial Services Agency, and other aspects of the Takenaka
plan, indicated all four would report losses in fiscal 2002.
Mr Okuda, who is also the chairman of Toyota Motor, the world's
third-largest carmaker, did not play down the impact of the
banking reforms on the broader economy, hinting that something
significant - such as the bankruptcy of a large company - could
happen as early as next month.
He added that the country should expect "a great number of
small and medium-sized enterprises [to] go bankrupt [and] a lot
of unemployed people", but that "Japan is naturally
anticipating such consequences and is judiciously preparing a
safety net".
The debate over the size of any safety net - which would be
financed by an extra budget - intensified yesterday after
Masajuro Shiokawa, finance minister, said he expected a tax
shortfall of between Y2,700bn (?22.33bn) and Y2,800bn this year.
A budget committee meeting on Monday next week is set to discuss
the size of the additional spending package.
* The Japanese economy extended its recovery from its worst
post-war recession in the third quarter, writes Mariko Sanchanta
in Tokyo, but data released yesterday revealed that the rebound
was losing momentum amid a slowdown in exports. The news prompted
the stock market to fall to a 19-year low and government bonds to
rally to four-year highs.
Gross domestic product in the July-September quarter grew 0.7 per
cent in real terms and 3 per cent on an annualised basis,
exceeding economists' forecasts. The government also upwardly
revised first and second-quarter GDP figures, extending Japan's
expansion to three consecutive quarters.
But the sustainability of the Japan's recovery - thus far
supported largely by external demand - was thrown into doubt
yesterday, as exports made a negative contribution to GDP for the
first time in a year.
銀行国有化発言 「奥田氏が明言」 英紙、会見詳報掲載 当初記事
The Times December 03,
2002
Why 'my' Japanese
crash may be pivotal
Economic
View by Anatole Kaletsky
LAST month I had the
strange experience of causing a one-man stock market crash. The
world’s biggest bank by assets, Mizuho Holdings,
lost 15 per cent of its value in a single hour and the Nikkei
average fell 5 per cent to its lowest level in two decades, in
response to an article which I wrote in that morning’s Times.
Although this
curious event happened two weeks ago and the falls in the Tokyo
stock market have now been completely reversed, some surprising
conclusions may possibly be drawn from it about the state of the
world’s second biggest economy and financial
market ー and prospects in the year ahead.
The article in
question reported an interview with Hiroshi Okuda, the chairman
of Toyota and of the Keidanren, the Japanese industrialists’ association.
Mr Okuda, speaking to five British journalists armed with radio
recorders and a TV camera, unexpectedly decided to think aloud
about the probability that one of Japan’s biggest banks would be
nationalised. This comment seemed to contradict the widespread
view in Tokyo that the four major banks were “too big
to fail” and investors dumped the shares of two “fragile” banks,
generally agreed to be Mizuho and UFJ.
Although the Times
story seemed to have the greatest market impact in Tokyo, an
almost identical account appeared in The Guardian and the
interview was recorded by the BBC World Service and Channel 4
News.
The Keidanren
quickly issued a denial, stating that Mr Okuda had never spoken “a word
on nationalisation of the four major banks”
and adding that his
comments had been misreported and misunderstood. Let me therefore
report precisely what Mr Okuda said.
He started by
answering a question about the banking reforms recently
introduced by Hazeo Takenaka, the Financial Services Minister.
Were foreign investors justified in thinking that genuine reforms
would require the failure of one of the major banks? “I myself
believe that these four major banks will survive,” Mr
Okuda answered. “But are you asking whether they would be
privately owned or nationalised?” He then explained, without
further prompting, that two of these big four banks were “very
solid”, but the other two were “fragile”. He
added: “As we see the progression of the Takenaka
reform scheme in December, the possible consequence that you
alluded to may be seen.”
Asked whether this
meant major banks would be nationalised, he answered: “Some
banks may not be able to meet international standards for capital
adequacy by the end of this year. Perhaps in the next few months
or so it will become clear which banks are not able to meet the 8
per cent capital level. The Government will then have to put in
capital and the banks will be nationalised.”
Finally, pressed on
the reason why these dramatic events could occur as soon as the
year-end, he took the trouble to spell out a detailed scenario,
involving “symbolic” bankruptcies of some of the “so-called
precarious companies” on “the list of 30 companies or the
list of 51 companies being circulated” around Japan. Such bankruptcies
would lead to “a very difficult situation for the
management of the big banks” by the end of the year.
What conclusions can
be drawn from this strange dialogue? The first and most
surprising one is that the Japanese stock market may finally have
hit a solid bottom last month.
When panic selling
of the kind seen last month can be triggered by a newspaper story
reporting nothing more than the comments of a private individual,
however senior, the chances are that the market is near a selling
climax. Investors in Japan may finally have reached the
capitulation point that marks the end of nearly every bear
market.
The only other time
that I was personally involved in a similar situation was almost
exactly two years ago, when Wim Duisenberg, the President of the
European Central Bank, unaccountably reflected out loud, in an
interview which he himself insisted should be “on the
record”, about the futility of efforts to support
the euro through intervention.
The euro fell almost
3 per cent in a few hours after this story was published. Some of
the world’s biggest currency traders told me later
that they had decided to liquidate their longstanding euro
positions that morning.
The next day, the
euro fell another 2 per cent to 82.50 ー and that turned out to be the
currency’s record low. It seems quite possible that
something similar may have happened to Japanese equities ー including
even Japanese bank shares ー last month.
My second conclusion
was that Mr Okuda, along with other Japanese industrialists who
have hinted at similar impatience with the banks’ reforms,
may not have been entirely surprised by the market reaction.
Japan is in a state of civil war over the fate of the Takenaka
financial reform plan and all the contending parties in this
struggle are willing to deploy whatever weapons may come to hand.
Maybe some of Japan’s top
industrialists are finally losing patience with the way that a
small group of banks and insolvent “zombie” companies have hijacked the
Japanese political system and sabotaged the economy.
Dividing lines are
certainly clearer than ever before between all the “opposing
forces” involved in Japan’s endlessly complex struggle:
reformers versus reactionaries; Bank of Japan (BoJ) versus
Ministry of Finance; industrialists versus bankers; small
businesses versus big ones; successful cash-rich companies (such
as Toyota) versus borrowers sinking ever deeper into debt.
While it is
impossible to understand, much less to predict, how all these
forces will interact, several practical conclusions can be made
after a visit to Japan:
Every intelligent
observer in Tokyo now agrees that Japan’s crisis must be treated with a
properly balanced combination of macroeconomic and structural
policies.
The BoJ would
seriously consider a massive further monetary expansion and a
huge increase in its government bond purchases if the Ministry of
Finance would agree to cut taxes and nationalise one or more of
the major banks. That is the good news. The bad news is that most
of the actors who must co-ordinate their actionsー the
BoJ, the politicians, the private bankers and the feuding
departments of the Ministry of Finance ー seem hardly to be on speaking
terms.
Since each
institution’s actions depend on decisions made by the
others, paralysis ensues. Even if we knew how or when the reform
process might be triggered, it would be impossible to describe
the exact denouement, any more than one can predict the
deployment of pieces at the end of a chess game by observing the
first few moves.
The Takenaka
financial reform plan is by no means dead, as many Western
analysts suggest, but neither is it likely to be as revolutionary
as originally hoped.
Mr Takenaka, and
maybe even Mr Okuda, may genuinely want to liquidate problem
borrowers and nationalise some of the banks, but the Japanese
establishment has not yet accepted that this must happen.
What mainly
constrains the reform process is not the power of the banks but
the fear of bringing down small companies, small retailers and
construction and distribution companies, which provide the
bedrock political support to the Liberal Democratic Party.
Everybody, including
even the radical reformers in the financial services agency and
the BoJ, seems to have accepted that small companies will have to
continue enjoying protection and subsidised lending for many
years to come.
Whatever happens in
the financial markets and banking system, Japan’s real
economy is now enjoying a decent cyclical recovery and this will
probably continue for the next year or two.
This was confirmed
by the strong GDP figures published last month. Most large
Japanese companies, (as long as they do not belong in the four
ugly sectors of retailing, distribution, property and
construction) are solvent and have no problems raising finance.
Their inventories are low and many have enjoyed surprisingly
strong domestic demand.
Japanese growth is
now led by consumption, not exports and there is every reason to
expect this pattern to continue. Consumers have long since given
up on the stock market and are showing an increasing propensity
to spend. There is no reason why bank reform should make them
panic, especially if small firms, which are the really big
employers, continue to enjoy government support.
What does all this
imply for the Japanese economy and financial markets? This is
where rational analysis breaks down. Even if the real economy
continues to grow, as it probably will, the stock market could
still collapse in the event of some big financial failures.
In the long term,
the balance of risks and rewards in Japan is definitely biased to
the upside.
But in the long run,
we’re all dead ー and investors in Japan know this
better than anyone else.