Saving the Sun: How Wall Street Mavericks Shook Up Japan's Financial World and Made Billions

by Gillian Tett

Saving the Sun tells the story of the world's largest private equity deal where American investors made billions of dollars rehabilitating Shinsei, a failed Japanese bank. Within that business saga is the dramatic tale of Japan's brightest financial minds, the men who made the Japanese economic miracle come to life, and their struggle against the economic failure in the 1990s. Into this climate of despair, where Japan seemed incapable of reviving prosperity, came a group of wily and determined Americans who would discover just how different the Japanese really are.

Genres: Japan, Economics, Nonfiction, Finance, History, Business, Politics

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Gillian Tett is a British author and journalist at the Financial Times, where she is a markets and finance columnist and U.S. Managing Editor. She has written about the financial instruments that were part of the cause of the financial crisis that started in the fourth quarter of 2007, such as CDOs, credit default swaps, SIVs, conduits, and SPVs. She became renowned for her early warning that a financial crisis was looming.

Reviews

[Bipin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great book for beginners.
I chanced upon this book on the lowest floor of our library where most books usually gather dust over the years and rarely get to be taken off the shelf. The cover caught my attention. I picked it up, thinking it was astronomy-related. I was apprehensive to start the book after I learned it talks about the Banking sector in Japan, two topics I knew nothing much about. But the title still intrigued me and I decided to give it a shot.
It was nothing like I imagined it to be. This book is about the human and cultural side of the banking crisis in Japan towards the end of twentieth century. My last brush with anything economics-related was a single course seven years ago. Once I got the hang of the limited jargon, this book read like a fiction book with a gripping plot unfolding over decades. The author did a great job (a lot of research and over 200 interviews) in writing it for a general audience, not too much jargon to frustrate an interested reader, not too watered down that I forget I am reading a non-fiction book.
It is interesting to read about how the Japanese banking influenced by their culture is vastly different from the rest of the world. I expected the Japanese to be portrayed as the naive natives and Americans as the savvy saviours, so I knew to take it with a grain of salt. But I was caught off-guard by this one segment that says a Japanese reformer that made a dent in the system was able to do so because of his christian beliefs. (If I want to read about religion, I would pick appropirate books. I am not a fan of such surprises.) Apart from that, the book was a great read. You get to know the key figures, to an extent the motives behind their actions (come on, this is real life, the author can't know everything), the key events that built up to and precipitated the crisis, and the aftermath. I am glad I picked it.

[Kris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Living in Japan, the descriptions of stubborn refusal to accept reality can be maddening.

The story is well told with some interesting characters. Some of the background is engaging with shady businessmen and a bizarre relationship between businesses, banks and government.

But the main facts of the case are pretty simple and spelled out on the cover: vulture fund buys tanking bank, fixes it up, makes a profit, moves on.

[Yushi · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a story. Great read to get a front row view of how an economic miracle turned into an economic malaise. The subtleties of Japanese culture on banking is lost for foreigners. Japan banks at the time were used to manage relationships, function as a collective whole, not $$$. Western culture may view some of the dealings as perfidious, or simply impossible. That was how Japan operated both in businesses and politics.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you love banking (ha!) and the cultural/business differences btw Japan and the US from 1998-2003, you will love this book. Consensus before implementation vs profit making individualism. Wow. For me, it was a walk back thru my history. The banking/business sections are always dry (but Tett still does a good job explaining), but to get into the various minds of the Japanese men who were trying to inact these reforms against such pushback was really something. To read about the sluggishness pace for change in the Gov't as well as the cultural shocks in the bank were both entertaining. Tett does an excellent job.

[Szeyao · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ha, my maiden review ! Well, the reason I picked this up was because Gillian Tett is the Financial Times Capital Markets editor, but has the interesting background of a PhD in Social Anthropology (so you don't need to have taken accountancy to understand banking and finance ha!) I like reading her stuff in FT, so I looked around to see if she'd written any books.

It's basically a bottom-up study of the Japanese real estate bubble and crash and long period of stagnation in the 1980s to 1990s. I.e, it's written from the view of individuals involved in Shinsei Bank, the former Long Term Credit Bank in Japan, and talks about how the bank sank under a tidal wave of bad loans from lending money to shady firms involved in real estate speculation. The book goes on to document the intercultural clashes that occurred after the Japanese reluctantly agreed to sell it to a US private equity firm as a sign of "reform".

What I found interesting was how it gave real life examples of all the "stereotypes" I read earlier about Japanese business (the consensus based culture, refusal to rock the boat etc) which I had earlier thought were slightly exaggerated. It also showed what different ideas of capitalism Anglo-Saxons and Japanese had - the Americans believe in "creative destruction" and Darwinian survival whereas Japan's idea is a lot of relationship-based. (so Japanese banks *continued* lending to insolvent companies on the grounds that they could not afford to disrupt the long-standing mutual business links)

A good book for anyone interested in private equity, finance and the source of Japan's economic problems. Somehow, I don't think I'm going to be buying Japanese equities (other than maybe Toyota =) anytime soon.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must-read for everybody interested in Japanese politics. The book focuses overwhelmingly on a single policy case study: trying to rescue during the late 1990s and early 2000s one massive Japanese bank from the mountain of bad loans it had accumulated as a consequence of the deals it struck with various companies in the decade prior to the burst of the country's real-estate-driven bubble. The mechanism by which this rescue is to take place is by bringing Western (Swiss and American) capital and banking techniques to Japan and implementing them in this new environment.

The reactions of the Japanese polity are depressing in their predictability, but serve as good examples of how hard it is to unroot practices that are thoroughly embedded in a given environment. However, the most frustrating part of reading Tett's book is not the Japanese actors' refusal to Westernize, but their collective failure to do anything to do _anything_ that would alter extant relationships between them in order to overcome an unfolding major crisis - save for closing their eyes, crossing their fingers and hoping it would all soon blow over.

Only four stars because i am still a bit bemused about what triggered the hike in the BOJ rate at the end of the 1980s. But otherwise an extremely educational read about how policy change does - or does not - happen in Japan.

[John Goodell · Rating 4 out of 5]

An illuminating analysis of Japan's debt crisis that began in 1989, and the reasons why and how that crisis has lingered on for over 25 years. I can't help but draw some relevance between this book that was published 12 years ago and Japan's economic woes of today.

Although Collins, Flowers, and many of the other western players in the restructuring and reform process of Japan's LTCB (now Shinsei) bank are by no means perfect or entirely benign in their motives, they helped revolutionize a system that was deeply in need of change. The moral of the book is that sometimes outsider perspective is the only catalyst for insider change, and that is precisely how one bank in one country with one very flawed financial system went from essentially insolvent to Japan's top investment bank.

[Andre Boivineau · Rating 3 out of 5]

Through the presentation of LTCB/Shinsei history, this book is an excellent introduction to :
- financial world
- financial crisis! (history just repeats itself...)
- Japanese business culture
- Japanese post-war history/way-of-life

Some finance-technical parts are tough/boring for beginners like me, just skip those lines and get all the other very interesting informations.

Read it while flying to Tokyo for your first businness trip there (or just if you want to understand post-war Japan & Japaneses)

[Jeremy Raper · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent account of the rise and fall of Shinsei aka Long Term Credit Bank. The salient takeaway point: Flowers was allowed to buy it because no other Japanese banks could justify (reputationally) buying it then using the put-back clause on bad loans to stuff the government with them - the move that basically allowed Flowers to clean the balance sheet at minimal cost. Otherwise, fairly well written but if you're not a japanophile of finance guy I wouldn't bother. Tett is generally much more readable in the FT.

[Alex Flores · Rating 3 out of 5]

The financial crisis that hit the United States in 2008 was not without precedent. Elected officials, financial talking heads and gurus, may have stated publicly they couldn't see the collapse coming, but it turns out Japan's decade-long recession from the early 90s through the mid-2000s suffered many of the same things the US economy has since 2008. The author does a good job explaining how the Japanese mindset and culture played heavily into the recession and how a more American way of banking might have saved Japan from such a long down period.

[Sylvain · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would have loved more "Japanese" elements and less "finance" elements, especially after having read The Big Short, which is hard to beat in terms of deep dive into the world of finance. Of course the book also suffers from the fact that it was written 10 years ago (but we can't blame Tett for that...), and we can't help but wonder "What happened next?". I read it for the Japanese culture elements, and I must say I smiled sometimes, as it confirms one thing: "that's how we do things in Japan".

[Raymond · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this book as it gives a valuable insight in Japanese business culture. It is well written. Many characters are introduced in the book, but in such a way that you're are never lost despite the difficult names. The author does not use banking jargon and it is certainly also readable for people less familiar with the financial industry.

[Ming · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty tell tale book of how the Japanese financial/business culture works! (and how it desperately needed intervention and unconventional solutions when the good times ended). It's true what they say, Japan is the only country in the world that communism actually survived/prospered, har har har.

[Arturs · Rating 4 out of 5]

This piece illustrates huge differences between Japanesse and American people while they are trying to "bridge" this cultural gap and save Japanesse bank. Liked book overall, but had feeling that at some points was struggling with economics concepts.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good read on the banking crisis, and why such an obvious problem festered for years. The overuse of exclamation points is very annoying though.

[Liriope · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a book about banking (and a foreign country's banking, at that) this is a pretty damned good book.

[Ken Gtwo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great look at the behind the scenes world of Japanese business and banking, and the end of the bubble era.