Conventional wisdom has it that the financial crisis originating in the US proves that the “Anglo-Saxon” financial model is too dangerous and too deeply flawed to have much to teach the rest of the world. If it were any good, after all, how could we have suffered the spectacular near-collapse of the US and UK banking systems?
But the prestige of the Anglo-Saxon financial system soared in the 1990s at least in part because the “other” main banking model seemed to have failed so spectacularly in the country that was long considered its greatest exponent.
In the 1980s Japanese banks funded one of the biggest stock and real estate bubbles of all time. Their reckless malinvestment is perhaps matched only by recent spending in China (whose banks, incidentally, share some characteristics with those of Japan).