Desperate times call for desperate measures. Woefully undercapitalised and under fresh pressure, since the appointment of a stricter banking regulator four months ago, to clean up their enormous bad loans, Japan's banks are trying to boost their capital any way they can. Mizuho, the world's largest bank, demonstrated on January 21st how painful this will be. It said that doubling its bad-loan disposals, writing off large losses on equities and adhering to tougher criteria for capital would lead to bigger-than-ex-pected losses in the year to March 31st. It now predicts a net loss of ￥2 trillion ($16.9 billion), the largest in Japanese corporate history and nine times more than it had forecast two months earlier.
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