Word: sickest
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...Mizuho's plight is the latest indication that Japan's biggest and sickest banks might ultimately require government bailout and takeover. The day of reckoning may be approaching. New, tougher accounting rules laid down by Heizo Takenaka, Japan's reform-minded chief of the Financial Services Agency (FSA), begin to take effect on April 1. Under the guidelines, banks will be required to declare worthless many of the questionable loans listed on their books as recoverable assets. Designed to force banks to clean up their rotten lending portfolios, later reforms will also likely restrict the dubious practice of counting future...
...remaining 90%, retailing just might be the sickest of the bunch. Large-scale stores are rare in Japan, so if you go shopping, chances are good that you'll find yourself in a joint like Yoko Nakamura's general store in Kamimoku, a hot springs resort hamlet of about 800 people, an hour and a half north of Tokyo by bullet train. Nakamura, the 73-year-old granddaughter-in-law of the store's founder, runs the place with two of her sons and their wives, selling beer and liquor, cigarettes, canned goods, toiletries and candy. Her store couldn...
...first?" routine, the coalition agreement unveiled last week by German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Green partner Joschka Fischer seems confused about basic issues, and destined to end where it began. But economists aren't laughing, because the E.U.'s biggest economy is also among its sickest: 3.94 million unemployed workers are draining government coffers, the GDP will grow only .5-.75% this year and the budget deficit will bust the E.U.'s 3% limit. Business leaders blame high taxes, expensive welfare programs and rigid labor laws, but the government seems to have learned nothing. "The [plan's] only...
...Find the sickest company you can, and the odds are good that Texas Pacific wants a hand in healing it--in return for a big ownership stake. After 9/11, few other investors would touch the airlines, which have lost two-thirds of their value in the past year. But ever since the Continental deal--which brought Bonderman and his partners 10 times their original investment--Texas Pacific has made a profitable habit of picking up airlines so far down on their luck that nobody wants them. "We're contrarian by nature," says co-founder Jim Coulter. "On many...
...waters along America's coastline may look inviting, but don't be fooled. In a new report, the EPA finds that 34% of the nation's coastal waters have such serious ecological problems that they cannot support aquatic life or even basic human activities, like fishing. Among the sickest seas: the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes...