Norinchukin, Owned By More Than 4,000 Shareholders Including Farm, Fishing & Forestry Cooperatives Has To Raise $ 20 Billion.....

WOW! This makes the followoing quote from their Annual Report 2008 even more "amusing"....

Donnerwetter! Die heutige Ankündigung macht die nachfolgende Bemerkung aus dem Annual Report 2008 vom März 2008 noch befremdlicher....

We, therefore, decided to invest our management resources in securities, both in Japan and overseas, under the concept of globally diversified investment.That means that we had decided to switch our business model from that of a conventional nvestor in the Japanese domestic market to a major investor on the international stage and raise our earning ability by carefully controlling our risk exposure.

The fact that the bank is owned almost solely from "cooperatives" makes the whole story even more stunning..... SCARY !

Das ausgerechnet eine Art Genossenschaftsbank hier den Vogel abschießt zeigt einmal mehr das man momentan rein gar nichts auschließen kann..... Beängstigend !

Norinchukin to Raise 1.9 Trillion Yen; CEO Quits Feb. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Norinchukin Bank, the Japanese agricultural lender with Asia’s largest losses on asset-backed securities, plans to raise 1.9 trillion yen ($20.2 billion) in capital and said its chief executive officer will step down.

Deputy President Yoshio Kono will replace CEO Hirofumi Ueno effective April 1, the company said in a statement today in Tokyo. Norinchukin will raise the funds from its members, a nationwide network of agricultural cooperatives with about $875 billion in deposits, by the end of March.

The fund-raising is the biggest in Asia since Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd. collected $22 billion in the world’s largest initial public offering in 2006. Norinchukin lost at least $10 billion on overseas asset-backed securities following the collapse of the U.S. housing market.

“Norinchukin’s capital faces increasing impairment risk due to its relatively large exposure to foreign securitized financial products,” Moody’s Investors Service said in November, when it revised the outlook on the Tokyo-based bank’s Aa2 credit rating to “negative” from “stable.”

> Reed this number twice........ We won´t probably see too many happy Japanese fischers etc for some time to come......

> Dank der nun folgenden schier unglaublichen Zahl wird man den Namen NORINCHUKIN wohl noch öfter im Zusammenhang mit negativen Schlagzeilen hören...... Glückliche japanische Fischer & Förster werden wohl die Ausnahme bleiben......

Norinchukin still had 6 trillion yen of asset-backed securities at the end of December

> Taken from their Presentation Of Capital Positions. For more updates visit their News Release Overview.

‘Material’ Pressure
Standard & Poor’s cut Norinchukin’s financial-strength rating in December, citing “material” pressure on capital. The bank had a Tier 1 consolidated capital-adequacy ratio of 6.83 percent under Basel II standards as of Dec. 31, down from 9.39 percent as of March 31, it said in a statement today.

Profit at the Tokyo-based bank, which was founded in 1923 and makes loans to farmers and fishermen, plunged 95 percent to 7.8 billion yen in the six months ended Sept. 30, from 143.6 billion yen a year earlier, as it posted an 81.5 billion yen loss on asset-backed securities.

Norinchukin was founded as a semi-governmental financial institution and was privatized in 1959, according to its Web site. The company had 4,260 shareholders at the end of March, made up of agricultural, fishery, forestry and related cooperatives.