Greg Ip

Economics focus

The spectre of nationalisation

There are ways for governments to revitalise banks without taking them over

Illustration by Jac Depczyk

IT IS generally easier to remove a kidney from a dead donor than a live one. When regulators in Scandinavia and America in the early 1990s started extracting the bad assets from their crisis-hit banking systems, it helped that the banks they dealt with were bust or in the government’s hands. Today, policymakers are trying to excise toxic assets from banks that are still, at least officially, private and viable. That is a much trickier proposition. Read the rest of this entry »