J.C. Flowers & Co. LLC

16 Jan

Japan’s “gaijin” bank provides a lesson in how not to do things

Posted by cahn in Bank, banking, Christopher Flowers, consumer-finance, finance, http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12725890, J.C. Flowers, J.C. Flowers & Co. LLC, Japan, Japanese government, Lehman Brothers, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Morgan Stanley, private-equity group, Shinsei Bank, Shinsei Bank,Limited, Supreme Court, Thierry Porté, USD, Western, Western Strategic Minerals Inc

I still believe the "gaijin" did the right thing.

AMATEUR hour was over. When Shinsei Bank was founded in 2000 from the husk of a failed Japanese lender, it was meant to show the country how to run a bank to international standards. Unfortunately, it has done just that. Japanese banks escaped big writedowns and even bought large stakes in Western banks. But Shinsei ploughed headlong into all three of global banking’s booby traps: consumer lending, subprime mortgages and the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers.