JAPAN

IMF Releases Report on Banking Crisis: Wishful thinking by Japanese regulators has prolonged the crisis in the country’s financial system and been a drag on the economy, the International Monetary Fund said in a report published Sunday. Comparing the approach of different countries to a range of early 1990s domestic banking crises, the IMF said Japan and France put off intervening in troubled banks and credit associations in the hope that they would be able to “earn their way out of trouble.” The authors unfavorably contrasted that approach to the more decisive debt workout programs implemented in several Nordic countries and, eventually, by the United States in its savings-and-loan crisis.