We'd had many policies that were unpopular, but many of us knew in our bones that the critics were right on this: it was an uncollectable tax.
Moreover, average current assets had risen to 319 days-worth of annual sales, suggesting that most of the SOEs' working capital was tied up in uncollectable bills or unsaleable inventory.
Since the late 1980s, DKB has, according to press reports, lent a staggering ¥27.5 billion to the two brothers with almost no collateral; ¥7.5 billion of this, the bank has admitted, is uncollectable.
A few days earlier Advanta, a provider of cards to small businesses, froze all existing accounts after charge-offs (uncollectable debt) reached a dizzying 20%.
The $18m by which Mr Khashoggi's debt has grown since being incurred would be uncollectable under any circumstances because charging interest violates sharia law.One ray of hope is Saudi Arabia's new enforcement law.
There are rises in both the charge-off and delinquency rates, which measure the share of balances that are uncollectable or more than 30 days late respectively.
They typically report only extremely delinquent accounts that they have written off as uncollectable, rather than those that are merely late or those that are paid on time.
CardHub.com, a credit-card industry site, crunched data from rating agencies and the Federal Reserve and found that in the 18-month period from January 2009 through June 2010, American lenders simply wrote off $124.1 billion in credit card balances as uncollectable.
The transaction also put Mr. Sallas in charge of the bank that a month earlier had deemed loans owed by his family's investment vehicles as uncollectable.
In the unlikely event that it was, Collecto would send the debt back to the Education Department as uncollectable.
It was revealed in January 2013 that the firm, which charges an annual interest rate of 5,853% APR, wrote off £76.8m during 2011 because thousands of loans proved to be uncollectable.
