Saving the Sun: A Wall Street Gamble to Rescue Japan from Its Trillion-Dollar Meltdown Gillian Tett(2003)

For more than a decade, Japan's dismal economy -- which has bounced from deflationary collapse to fitful recovery and back to collapse -- has been the biggest obstacle to economic growth. Why has the world's second largest economy been unable to save itself? Why has a country, whose financial might in the 1980s was the most feared force on the globe, become the sick man of the world economy? Why has the industrial transformation once called the Japanese Miracle frozen into the Japanese malaise? Saving the Sun answers these questions by telling the story of Long Term Credit Bank, one of the nation's most respected financial institutions, and its attempts to transform itself into a Western-style bank. Through the stories of three extraordinary men, former Financial Times Tokyo bureau chief Gillian Tett brings to life the bank's long struggle to regain its financial health. In the process, she shines a light into the secretive world of Japanese banking where business is done in sex bars a