“The situation is quiet but we are not out of the woods yet,” says the chairman of Taiwan’s Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC), Mr Sheng-Cheng Hu, of the efforts to clean up the island’s banking sector following the consumer lending crisis.
Last month one of the troubled banks, Ta Chong Bank, secured Corsair Capital, a US private equity fund, as an investor alongside Carlyle in a bid to recapitalise. Altogether five banks have been taken over by the government since the crisis began but while Taiwan has had its own debt problems, the island’s exposure to the US subprime problem is relatively small – $2.5bn at the most – and the economy remains strong.
