Does the U.S. need to heed the advice it once offered Japan?

When Japan's banking system had its own meltdown in the early 1990s, the advice offered by the U.S. was to admit the damage, take corrective action and move on. Now, in a deja vu reminiscent of some Greek tragedy, the U.S. banking system finds itself in similar peril, a story in the Wall Street Journal suggests that sometimes the best advice is that which finds it way back to the source:

When Japan was mired in economic crisis, the U.S. urged it to take decisive action to deal with its ailing banks. Japan didn't follow the advice and the crisis dragged on for years. Now, it is the U.S. that is mired in crisis and facing the prospect of swallowing the bitter medicine it once proffered...

Japan's stock-market bubble began rapidly deflating in 1990 and its property bubble followed suit shortly afterward. Many borrowers were unable to make payments on their debt and bad loans piled up on bank balance sheets. A long period of lackluster economic growth made a tough situation worse. With the financial system saddled with bad debts, Japan desperately needed its banks to acknowledge the severity of their problems and for some banks to shut their doors. But the banks, unwilling to take steps that might render them insolvent, refused to acknowledge their problems, extending the crisis...

Still, U.S. financial firms have been much quicker to acknowledge losses than their Japanese counterparts were. While the slicing and dicing of mortgages into tradable securities played a part in the mortgage mess, accounting rules make it difficult for firms to ignore losses on those securities, says Princeton University economist Hyun Song Shin. In contrast, by continuing to extend credit to bad borrowers, Japanese banks were able to put off recognizing the extent of their debt problems.

"The denial strategy is harder to pull off -- it will catch up to you in the accounting," says Mr. Shin. "That's one of the more encouraging and hopeful signs in the U.S."...

One last problem the current U.S. situation shares with Japan in the 1990s may be a financial sector that is far larger than it should be. "If you have an unsustainable lending boom, then by definition the lending has to shrink," says Adam Posen, a deputy director at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

In Japan, that didn't happen. Rather than failing, troubled banks merged with healthier ones. But even though the combined bank would often end up with branches that were within steps of one another, few bank workers lost their jobs. Mr. Posen worries that concerns about the systemic risk to the financial system will prevent the U.S. from allowing enough firms to shut their doors to make the necessary capacity cuts.

In that regard, the tougher line with Wall Street that U.S. officials took over the weekend is encouraging. Refusing to financially backstop a takeover of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. with government money, as they did for J.P. Morgan's hasty acquisition of Bear Stearns, they showed they were far more willing to let a troubled firm fail than their Japanese counterparts were. Also, many financial firms have already begun cutting operations in a way Japanese banks balked at...

Quickly shrinking the financial sector could have a social cost, as well, putting tens of thousands of people out of work. Where will they go?