Banks have been slow to write off bad loans.
The Internal Revenue Service has been slow to write rules governing the law's so-called employer mandate.
Banks in Japan have been notoriously slow to write off bad loans, even when there is little or no chance they will be repaid.
Agencies have been slow to write the regulations, including the provision known as the Volcker Rule, which seeks to prevent financial institutions with government backing from placing bets with their own capital.
All the bad news may not yet be reflected on their balance-sheets; although they have had to take the hit on traded securities, like CMBSs, banks are usually slow to write down property-related loans.
Currently, this technique is only useful for archiving, because it is slow to write and decode, but the density of information is higher than for Blu-Ray discs or hard drives.
The Americans switched course at least partly because bank regulators feared that under the agreement banks might be too slow to write down the value of loans that could go bad, making the banks appear to be better capitalized than they really were.
By comparison, the highest estimates of the bad-loan situation in Japan, where banks have been in desperate straits for a decade and are very slow to write loans off, put the size of the problem at 15percentt or less of outstanding loans.
In the mean time, asset prices continued to fall, banks were slow to write off their portfolios of non-performing loans, and the financial crisis claimed another victim, Lehman Brothers.
If this happens, the computer appears busy and is slow to write and read things from your hard disk.
