Several pre-crisis indicators suggested that banks in Indonesia and Malaysia were actually
stronger in 1997 than they had been just a few years earlier. For example, average nonperforming
loans actually fell between 1994 and 1996 from 12% to 9% in Indonesia (and even
more sharply for privately-owned Indonesian banks), and from 8% to 4% in Malaysia, according
to data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS, 1997). While these indicators are
themselves flawed (bad debts often aren=t recognized, or reported, until macroeconomic
difficulties hits), they do undercut the view that Asian banks were recklessly in trouble on the eve
of the crisis. Indonesian banks, unlike banks in the rest of the region, had borrowed very little
offshore, and domestic bank lending had increased only modestly in the early 1990s. Barry
Bosworth (1998) reports an index of bank strength based on 1996 ratings of commercial banks by
Moody=s Investor Services which indicates that there was little to distinguish the quality of banks
in the Asian crisis economies from non-crisis emerging markets.