Japan to propose bailout fund at G-7

Friday October 10, 3:33 am ET By Yuri Kageyama, AP Business Writer
Japan to propose international bailout fund at G-7 meeting
TOKYO (AP) -- Japan is set to propose to the world's leading industrialized nations that a joint fund be set up to give emergency loans to nations hit by the growing financial crisis, the finance minister said Friday.
Japanese Finance Minister Shoichi Nakagawa said he is set to make the proposal at the Group of Seven meeting of finance and central bank officials that he is attending in Washington.
"Japan would like to see what it can do to work with other countries to ensure ample capital supply," he said on nationally televised NHK news.
He did not give details of the plan. But he said Japan's experience in dealing with its bad debt crisis in the 1990s may offer lessons for the other G-7 nations.
He said he hopes to tell others how Japan injected public money into banks at that time to bolster their capital after the so-called bubble economy of soaring land and stock prices burst and banks got stuck with mountains of bad debt.
His comments come at a time when Washington, which is implementing a $700 billion bailout, mainly to buy bad mortgages and mortgage-related securities from banks and financial institutions, may also need to inject capital in them and take partial ownership.
Britain is moving to pour cash into troubled banks in exchange for stakes in them -- a partial nationalization. In Iceland, the government now has control of all three of the country's major banks as it struggles to contain the troubles there.
Japan's proposal will call for setting up a cooperative scheme through the International Monetary Fund to dole out emergency lending to nations whose financial systems run out of cash, The Nikkei, Japan's top business daily, reported in its Friday's editions, without citing sources.
China and Middle Eastern nations will also be asked to contribute money to the fund, the report said, in an effort to prevent the further spread of the global fallout from the U.S. credit crisis.