Major banks have announced measures to raise capital, and narrowing of the spread between bank debentures and government bonds suggests that the markets have to some extent welcomed such measures. At the same time, however, it would appear that many market participants want more time to assess whether such measures would support the increase of banks' earning powers.
As was stated in "Japan's nonperforming Loan Problem" released last October by the Bank of Japan, while the problem was previously characterized primarily as the disposal of the fallout of the bursting of asset price bubbles, recently it has increasingly become more a question of the disposal of nonperforming loans newly generated during the transformation of industry and individual businesses.