Painful as it may be, acting swiftly to tackle the U.S. financial crisis with a public bailout is the right move — and perhaps the chief lesson from Japan's bad debt debacle of the 1990s, economists and politicians here say.
Japan waited too long — seven years — before resorting to a bailout of banks, burdened with mountains of bad loans, they say. The result: what Japanese call the "lost decade" of economic stagnation.
"Things are moving at a tremendous speed in the U.S. compared with Japan," said Koetsu Aizawa, professor of economics at Saitama University. "It seems the U.S. learned from Japan's situation."