For China's banks the lessons lie mainly in the rapid fall, rather than the slow rise.
However, all this activity merely reveals the scale of the task of cleaning up China's banks.
The possibility that China's banks are more troubled than they seem is not lost on investors.
ECONOMIST: Chinese banks are undergoing an odd kind of bail-out
Morgan in Hong Kong, thinks it cannot, because of the dismal state of China's banks.
China's banks have lent too much money to decrepit state enterprises and grandiose property schemes.
China's banks should also be able to withstand falling house prices better than their American counterparts.
ECONOMIST: China is pretty well placed to cushion a global downturn
Complacent about the money coming in, China's banks are also too free about the money going out.
By comparison, China's banks issue nearly 8 trillion yuan in new loans annually.
At present, China's banks shovel workers' savings into state-owned enterprises, depriving workers of spending power and private companies of capital.
The bad news is that, despite all the claims from Beijing and foreign analysts, China's banks were never really reformed.
Besides, China's banks will not have to raise capital immediately, so a fleeting ramp-up in the share price will not help them.
The difficulty is that after a decade of a tight peg, China's banks, firms and politicians are terrified of the uncertainty of a float.
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If mortgages did turn sour, how badly would China's banks suffer?
The deal is an indication of how reformists in central government intend to use foreign capital and management skills as a way to shake up China's banks.
More generally, China's banks should be better insulated from the global credit crunch than Western banks because the country's system is funded through deposits rather than capital markets.
ECONOMIST: China is pretty well placed to cushion a global downturn
Unfortunately, China's banks are headed for another bad-loan crisis.
Others have cited their holdings of foreign assets - the biggest amongst China's banks - as a cause for concern, as the rise in the value of the yuan has made these less profitable.
China's banks are getting in on the action.
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The picture in manufacturing is all not rosy, however, since output from inefficient state-run firms being bankrolled by the state to avoid too-rapid job cuts and instability is causing fears about the strength of China's banks.
Many of China's banks are already beset by problem loans, in part because they have long been obliged for policy reasons to extend capital to enterprises that by normal banking criteria would be deemed poor credit risks.
Meanwhile, China Life's Chairman Yang Chao says it also has plans to become a financial holding company and has been buying stakes in a number of China's banks and other financial institutions to further that aim (See story "Ready to Deal").
In total lending, that is largely unchanged from 2009, when China's banks led a massive expansion of credit roughly doubling the volume of new loans from a year earlier as part of a stimulus program to keep the economy humming during the global financial crisis.
He has given China's rotten banks three years to shape up: the Bank of China, for instance, the country's least sick state bank, is about to announce it will sack half its 200, 000 staff.
China's major banks have already grown more conservative in how they issue wealth-management products.
Last week China's commercial banks were banned from providing bank loans for stockmarket speculation.
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