bargain or burden?
A buck is only worth 106.29 yen right now. If Japan has bucks, they might as well use them.
Weeeeelllll.... that depends.
If the Japanese bankers have judged the liabilities of the banks taking their deal correctly, it could be quite the bargain.
If, however, the Japanese banks are doing what Bank of America did with Countrywide Finance, the Japanese banks could find that they have to fling a lot more cash into the banks they’re propping up.
BofA didn’t plan to buy Countrywide. They bought $2B worth of CFC around $17/share. But as CFC continued to collapse due to a lack of liquidity, BofA realized that if they wanted to not simply write off the $2B, they were going to have to buy all of CFC to inject sufficient control and liquidity to keep CFC a viable investment.
If the Japanese have deep enough pockets, we’ve now seen that the idiots at the helm(s) of US banks are incompetent enough to have put their banks into a situation where their entire operation can be bought out at fire-sale prices - and the only alternative is bankruptcy, during which the price for the buy-out will only go lower.
The US banks might avoid this, if they get their heads out of their posteriors and belly up to the Fed’s discount window.