Pooling the resources

The decade-long recession in Japan has hit the country’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) hard. Faced with ballooning non-performing loans and a bleak outlook for the economy, banks have been cutting back sharply on corporate lending over the last few years. For Japan’s myriad smaller companies, this represents the shutting down of their only source of funding, and with few alternatives open to them, SMEs have been faced with a growing credit crisis. But the country’s