Rating: 
Summary: Good but not the whole story
Review: Overall Tett has done an exemplary job in summarizing the basic events surrounding LTCB / Shinsei. Her access to senior Japanese management of the old LTCB is particularly impressive. No Japanese journalist has gotten such close personal access to the men involved. In addition, her book provides very thorough background of the history of Japanese banking right up through the "bubble" years. Tett's book , however, does have some shortcomings. First and foremost, she overstates the role of Yashiro and drastically understates the key role of Chris Flowers and Brian Prince in the bad loan cleanup phase. Those two, more than anyone else, deserve credit for doing the really tough work. Moreover she appears to have fallen under the spell of the very glib Tim Collins and therefore has exaggerated his contribution as well. Collins is essentially a money raiser, he is not the architect of the LTCB/shinsei deal. Flowers again deserves the credit here. Perhaps Tett missed this because Flowers is famous for his reticence with the press. Lastly Tett seems overly focussed on the (gasp!) fact that some financial sector employees in Japan (gasp!) frequent strip clubs and hostess bars. I guess she hasn't been out on the town in London or New York recently....SUMMARY: Good general chronological summary and overview but lacks deep understanding of key element -- the bad debt workout.
Rating: 
Summary: A PIECE OF THE "JAPAN IS NO.1"STORY
Review: Remember when American business magazines ran endless stories about Japan becoming " No1" in the world of global corporations? Of course you do .Where are all those writers and publishers to-day? Retired to the sidelines of the public relations industry, no doubt.Instead we are being treated to books like " Saving the Sun" portraying Japanese banks and borrowers as idiots who rode the global financial bubble into truckloads of bankruptcies.
Hitherto unknown author Tett wheels some big brand names onto the scene--Volcker,Reed,Goldman Sachs,Morgan Stanley,Summers,etc etc.But the book fails to fully explain how a bunch of Japanese idiot bankers and investors( Note carefully:all the Americans in this tome are savvy)got the go-ahead to lose $trillions upon $trillions.Nor is there any explanation why Japanese political and financial leaders behaved like fools when the bubble burst in 1989 and continue to behave like idiots.Perhaps Japan really is a piggybank in the American Pacific Empire.
Rating: 
Summary: A must read for all CEOs!
Review: Tett did a great job in writing this book. Collins, Flowers, Yashiro, Reed, Volker, Onogi, Jordan, Summers, Rockefeller.... read like a list of who's who in Global Finance.... It is a page turner. Ripplewood bought the bankrupt LTCB Japanese bank and turned it around. It serves as a blueprint for US and global investors. Tim Collins started this venture but there was little mention about his contribution in the later part of the book. The ending seems too short. I hope to see a sequel next year.
Rating:
Summary: A must read for all CEOs!
Review: Tett did a great job in writing this book. Collins, Flowers, Yashiro, Reed, Volker, Onogi, Jordan, Summers, Rockefeller.... read like a list of who's who in Global Finance.... It is a page turner. Ripplewood bought the bankrupt LTCB Japanese bank and turned it around. It serves as a blueprint for US and global investors. Tim Collins started this venture but there was little mention about his contribution in the later part of the book. The ending seems too short. I hope to see a sequel next year.
Rating: 
Summary: Insightful Analysis
Review: The book, Saving the Sun, offers an insightful analysis of the economy of Japan, the world's second largest economy, and the possible reasons for its long persisting ailment. The author, Gillian Tett, believes that a possible solution lies in the American experience, provided that the experience is united with an understanding of the differences in goals and the different ways of achieving the right goal for Japan. Tett clearly shows that to succeed one has to combine the universal with the particular, the disciplined objectivity with an obligatory sense of empathy toward the problems unique to Japan. One cannot help but admire Tett's creative insight and the sensitivity she shows to the understanding of pressures that Japanese way of doing things must go through.
Rating:
Summary: Japan's Long Decline
Review: This book argues that the problem with the Japanese economy is systemic and is unlikely to change absent a national crisis. The subject matter is the 1998 Ripplewood acquisition of LTCB, a fallen pillar of the Japanese banking system, but the conclusions are broader, applying to the whole Japanese economy. The Japanese economy is a complex web of business relationships that performed astonishingly well during the 1950-1985 growth phase. However, this interwoven system became dependent on perpetual growth and rising stock and land prices to bail out poor lending decisions. Now that Japan is a no-growth economy with falling prices, the bad debt load has become enormous. The Japanese concepts of group harmony and consensus, combined with bureacratic control of the financial system, means that changing the whole system is tremendously difficult. The reason Japan is not yet in chaos is that the ultra low interest rates allow even the most unworthy borrowers to make nominal interest payments to keep themselves classified as "healthy". To quote from the book, "The banks are insolvent but very liquid. It is only illiquid banks that fail." It may be several years off, but it still looks very likely Japan will experience a national banking crisis. Ultimately, Japan faces daunting challenges: its government debt is now over 150% of GDP, roughly 2.5x the debt load of the US government. The demographics are solidly against economic growth with an explosion in the ratio of dependent-to-working citizens. If the Japanese were capable of taking radical action today, there is still probably enough time to get the country back on track. However, the idea of creative destruction, or letting bad companies go broke, is anathema in Japan where such an action would violate the sense of group harmony and is seen as a barbaric excess of Anglo-Saxon capitalism. Allowing such bankruptcies might also begin the process of bringing down the house of cards and that may be the real reason the Japanese do not want to begin the process of clean-up.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding focused explanation of the Japanese loan problem
Review: This book chronicles the fall of Japan's Long Term Credit Bank (LTCB, not to be confused with American Long Term Capital Management) and it's resurrection as Shinsei. The story starts with the problems created in Japan's real estate bubble, and how they left Japanese banks saddled with poor performing loans. The story zeroes in on the problems that caused LTCB to fail. It then covers the revival of the bank with the assistance of an American private equity fund, and the struggle of the new managers to play within the constraints of the Japanese system. This book highlights several issues with reform in Japan:
1) The business problems are never what they seem on the surface.
2) There are deep cultural issues at play that transcend mere language barriers.
3) Working on a turnaround in Japan is a tremendously challenging ordeal for people on both sides.
4) There is no simple economic or cultural solution. So was it a success? Well, depends on how you define a success. Collins and Flowers put a $1.2 billion in the bank. The government accepted $10 billion in returned loans, on top of a recapitalization. $27 billion in bad loans were disposed of. The bank winds up with a projected market cap of about $10 billion. So was it a transfer of public wealth to private wealth? Or a neccessary step in reforming the banking system? The reader is left to decide. If the book has one shortcoming, it's the presentation. I certainly enjoyed it, but the focus is much narrower than the title of "Saving the Sun" would highlight. While broader banking issues are tackled, the book centers on one bank and a small group of investors, and no broader Wall Street/Ginza tie-ups. In all it is well worth the time for anyone interested in the Japanese financial sector. It is one of the strongest books I've read in describing the economic situation in Japan, and melds cultural and antropological issues into describing the problems and solutions. Very well done!
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding focused explanation of the Japanese loan problem
Review: This book chronicles the fall of Japan's Long Term Credit Bank (LTCB, not to be confused with American Long Term Capital Management) and it's resurrection as Shinsei. The story starts with the problems created in Japan's real estate bubble, and how they left Japanese banks saddled with poor performing loans. The story zeroes in on the problems that caused LTCB to fail. It then covers the revival of the bank with the assistance of an American private equity fund, and the struggle of the new managers to play within the constraints of the Japanese system. This book highlights several issues with reform in Japan:
1) The business problems are never what they seem on the surface.
2) There are deep cultural issues at play that transcend mere language barriers.
3) Working on a turnaround in Japan is a tremendously challenging ordeal for people on both sides.
4) There is no simple economic or cultural solution. So was it a success? Well, depends on how you define a success. Collins and Flowers put a $1.2 billion in the bank. The government accepted $10 billion in returned loans, on top of a recapitalization. $27 billion in bad loans were disposed of. The bank winds up with a projected market cap of about $10 billion. So was it a transfer of public wealth to private wealth? Or a neccessary step in reforming the banking system? The reader is left to decide. If the book has one shortcoming, it's the presentation. I certainly enjoyed it, but the focus is much narrower than the title of "Saving the Sun" would highlight. While broader banking issues are tackled, the book centers on one bank and a small group of investors, and no broader Wall Street/Ginza tie-ups. In all it is well worth the time for anyone interested in the Japanese financial sector. It is one of the strongest books I've read in describing the economic situation in Japan, and melds cultural and antropological issues into describing the problems and solutions. Very well done!
Rating:
Summary: The Japanese banking crisis as an anthropological study
Review: What is new to be said about Japan's now decade-long financial crisis? A Wall Street Journal financial reporter has returned to her roots as a trained anthropologist to look at the cultural implications behind Japan's continued failure to deal definitively with its insolvent banking system. The core point that Gillian Tett returns to again and again is that Japan's problems started when its traditionally-run banks extended into global markets. There they operated without any of the checks and balances provided by either Japanese society or Western business methods. American, European and Australian customers were only too happy to take advantage of Japanese banks that lent money without any attempt at risk analysis. They called the bankers "unseasoned" and "juvenile". The Japanese, on their part, saw the West as a Garden of Eden, ripe for the picking. It was sweet revenge after the humilation of World War II. The important point is that these wealthy, powerful men with their sophisticated knowledge of derivatives and debentures, were hopelessly naïve about the differences between Japanese and Western social and business assumptions. Despite many of the Japanese having lived and (often very successfully) worked in Europe or the US, and some of the Americans having lived in Japan, neither side showed any insight into the social mentality of the other. Crucially, this caused them to misinterpret even such basic tools of their trade as the implications behind a simple insurance contract.
There aren't many heroes in this tale. The Japanese bankers and their Japanese customers were crudely vulgar. The Western "ex-patriots" in Japan were crassly bad-mannered. It's no surprise that the more the Japanese public learned about both groups, the more outraged they became. Frustratingly, even the ongoing churn of politicians and political parties in an attempt to get the system reformed, and a few nominal criminal charges of fraud against some of the Japanese participants has failed to significantly cut the Gordian knot created in the 1980's and 1990's. At the date of publication (and of this review), Japan is still an economic basket case, its banks loaded with an unstable mountain of debt. In the final chapter, Tett lets the major participants involved in the takeover of one of the biggest banks by a Kansas-based "vulture" fund have the last say. Unsurprisingly, they all disagree with each other.
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