ABSTRACT
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, partial deregulation and new financial instruments allowed financial firms to create new "financial technologies," called zaitech in abbreviated Japanese, which—in the heady atmosphere of the times—were aggressively offered to financial and nonfinancial firm customers. Inevitably, like the times themselves, the term zaitech later came to connote speculative and imprudent financial dabbling and quasilegal manipulation of financial books for the purpose of "window dressing."
