Word: failed
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...group was broken apart. Some assets were sold. (Ironically, GM acquired some of Daewoo's car company.) Other affiliates got debt restructurings; a government agency bought up Daewoo loans from the financial sector at a discount. Billions were lost. But the whole concept that Daewoo was too big to fail proved false. The reality was that Daewoo had become more burden than boon. Many of the loans it had gobbled up were effectively bad, however they were characterized on banks' balance sheets, because it was unlikely that Daewoo could have paid them off. Government officials and bank executives were simply...
...watch the Big Three bailout saga unfold in Washington from halfway around the world here in Hong Kong, a phrase comes to mind that used to be commonly heard in Asia: "Too big to fail." There was a time when politicians, bankers and bureaucrats in Asian countries thought that certain large enterprises were simply too important to go bankrupt, no matter how miserable their performance. The resulting unemployment would be unacceptable, the impact on the financial sector and economic growth too great. That, in effect, is the same argument being used today by supporters of a government rescue...
...experience in Asia over the past decade shows that no company is too big to fail, the fallout is often not as painful as the dire predictions and, in the medium to long term, economies may actually benefit by permitting their deadweight...
...because the Korean economy is so much smaller. Daewoo had about $50 billion in revenues. The entire South Korean gross domestic product in 1999 was only $450 billion. (GM, by comparison, had $181 billion in revenues in 2007, while U.S. GDP reached $13.8 trillion.) Daewoo seemed too big to fail...
...fact, it's not hard to argue that the Korean economy was better off with Daewoo out of the way. The persistence of the belief that Daewoo and the other giant Korean conglomerates were too big to fail led many bankers and bond investors to toss billions at them no matter how loony their business plans or unprofitable their projects. Money was wasted in unproductive ways. Once the too-big-to-fail perception was finally dispelled and the large conglomerates were no longer considered the safest investments, bankers and investors, looking for new opportunities, more readily financed small firms, entrepreneurs...