In particular, they suffer from a banking system skewed in favour of state-owned enterprises, which receive more than four-fifths of all bank loans.

ECONOMIST: China��s private surprise

On some estimates, these already amount to 40-50% of all bank loans.

ECONOMIST: China's economy

Earlier this year the central-bank governor, Dai Xianglong, admitted that 5-6% of all loans are unrecoverable.

ECONOMIST: China��s banks

Nearly 60% of all Romanian bank loans in 1997 were non-performing, says the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

ECONOMIST: Romania

Instead, we have overcapacity in almost all industries that the government has subsidized, mounting non-performing bank loans, fiscal deficits among local governments, rampant corruption and widening income inequality.

FORBES: China's Crisis of Confidence

So what we've said is let's make all these direct loans, as opposed to having bank intermediaries or -- and not just banks -- financial services organizations.

WHITEHOUSE: Online Town Hall

One part ("the bad bank") will assume all the residential and commercial real-estate loans and securitized mortgages as assets, and all the long-term debt as liabilities.

WSJ: Banks Need Fewer Carrots and More Sticks

However, these branches deliver just 9% of Lloyds' profit - largely because what's being sold is in effect a low-margin mortgage bank, without the benefit of all the other higher margin loans and products that Lloyds also sells its millions of customers.

BBC: Lloyds sale of Verde hits huge obstacle

For example between 1985 and 1988, about 80 percent of all Western commercial bank credits to the former Soviet Union took the form of untied, balance-of-payments loans with no effort made to identify where the money was going or how it would be used.

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