Even when that is not so, governments may themselves be financially constrained: bank recapitalisations must earn effective returns that exceed the costs of 4  raising additional finance (usually additional borrowings) or from cutting back on other fiscal expenditures. Hence, it is quite common, even for government-owned under-capitalised banks to take a while to get adequately recapitalised, if at all.
Regardless of the reason for the under-capitalisation of banks to persist, what is observed is that creditors of under-capitalised banks are not only offered off-balance sheet government guarantees, notably deposit insurance, but also implicit guarantees to uninsured creditors.