There are other countries that actually were running a surplus and had fairly responsible fiscal policies but had weaknesses similar to what happened here with respect to their housing market or the realestate markets, and that has weakened their financialsystem.
Since property accounts for so much of the financial system's aggregate balance-sheet, losses from real-estate busts are likely to be synchronised across banks.
It began by raising the capital reserves its banks had to hold, in effect removing money from its financialsystem, and increasing the size of down-payments required to purchase realestate.
Commercial realestate loan defaults did rise along with residential defaults, but the commercial sector never went down enough to throw the financialsystem into crisis.