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).