Economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff triggered a vigorous round of naysaying earlier this year when they released a paper suggesting a government debt-to-gross domestic product ratio of 90% is a magic threshold beyond which debt can stifle economic growth.
After all, even after the relief provided by the first batch, the banks' bad-loan ratio still stands at 22%, according to Guonan Ma and Ben Fung in a recent paper for the Bank for International Settlements.