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To: Jess Beltz who wrote (6067)	6/28/1998 8:18:00 PM
From: Stitch	Respond to of 10921

Jess, I hope you enjoyed your last hike. As an ex-pat I can imagine there is some poignancy in your departure even though I know you must be pleased to be returning home. <<NO westerner associated with or knowledgeable of the Japanese economic scene has anything but the most dire predictions about it, and (>> I had just been commenting on another thread about the unprecedented levels of crticism Japan is undergoing in the international community. I truly have not seen a single outside source of praise for the policymaking in Japan so far and, on the contrary am aware of quite a bit of internal criticism. It just all seems so incredible to me as I do not believe we have seen anything like this before. One wonders how far this stolid face saving can go. exchange2000.com Best, Stitch

To: Jess Beltz who wrote (6067)	6/28/1998 8:52:00 PM
From: Ramsey Su	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10921

Jess, just found the numbers on Nikkei net pertaining to the Sumitomo/LTCB "merger". Sumitomo supposedly has 15.64 Trillion yen in assets with 1.134 trillion in bad loans 7.27%. LTCB has 26.19 trillion yen in assets with 1.379 trillion in bad loans 5.26%. Fishy item #1. Based on these figures, Sumitomo is in worse shape than LTCB. Fishy item #2. The combined bad debt is only 2.530 trillion yen, less than US$18 billion. Let us assume the entire portfolio of bad debts are uncollectables, this is simply a VERY SMALL problem for two of the biggest banks in Japan. Fishy item #3. If LTCB is one of the worst banks, then the others should be healthier so their proportional amount of bad debts should be smaller. In the aggregate, I wonder how one can come up with this $500 - $600 billion figure that the world has been using as bad debt estimates. Something is not adding up. Ramsey