By Dec. 31, 2001, nonperforming assets, which include nonperforming commercial loans, other real estate owned and consumer loans, hit $3.6 billion, a 14% increase from Sept. 30, 2001.
Nonperforming assets, including bad loans, fell to $542 million from $578.8 million a year earlier.
They have been unwilling to close plants that are basically nonperforming assets.
Even as the economy deteriorated, nonperforming assets actually fell 1percentt from the third quarter.
At the end of last year, nonperforming assets totaled just $74 million, or 2 percent of the bank's loans outstanding.
Now they are nonperforming assets, not a small power forward and a bulky 7-foot-2-inch center.
Loan quality is going up, nonperforming assets are going down and they are still adding to their reserves.
Mr. Schmidt said that in the second quarter, nonperforming assets would account for 0.85percentt of banks' total assets.
In the quarter that ended March 31, the bank doubled the amount of provisions for nonperforming assets from the previous quarter, according to Enam Securities in Mumbai.
Today, Standard & Poor's took note of the Takenaka plan's "more stringent self-evaluation standards" for banks and warned that "nonperforming assets are likely to increase substantially" through March.
"A year later, they had increased their reserves to only $1.9 billion, when nonperforming assets had soared to $5.5 billion," he said.
