I am sure the distinguished audience would recall that such un-hedged and floating-rate-based foreign currency exposures culminated eventually into the now-all-too-familiar apocalyptic denouement, entailing forex losses in India and the East Asian Currency crisis in India’s neighbourhood!
During this period, Japanese firms were weighed down by the need to resolve the so-called three excesses – excess labor, capital stock, and debt – that had piled up during the preceding bubble period and could not sufficiently respond to changes such as increasing globalization and the revolution in information and communication technology.