Poor English saved Japan bankers from Lehman

TOKYO: Japan’s banks emerged from the 2008 global credit crisis largely unscathed because senior employees did not speak English well enough to have got them into trouble, the country’s finance minister said yesterday. Taro Aso, who also serves as deputy prime minister, said bankers in Japan had not been able to understand the complex financial instruments that were the undoing of major global players, so had not bought them.
The one-time prime minister said in January the elderly should be allowed to “hurry up and die” instead of costing the government money with expensive end-of-life medical care. In 2007 he had to apologize for a quip about patients with Alzheimer’s disease and for making light of flood damage in central Japan.