[1] The Diet of Japan enacted a Long-Term Credit Bank Act in June 1952 which became effective that December, and LTCB was incorporated as a stock company (kabushiki kaisha) with headquarters in the Kudan district of north-central Tokyo.

Hayato Ikeda, then Minister of Finance, led the initiative to create LTCB as a specialty bank for the purpose of providing long-term credit to Japanese companies.

A 1985 accord liberalized the Japanese financial services industry to a great degree and spurred the need for LTCB to dramatically change its business model.

The bank later became particularly infamous for its investments in overleveraged hotel acquisitions in New York, Saipan, Vietnam and Australia, among other locales, as the Japanese asset price bubble grew in the late 1980s.

Lawrence Summers, then U.S. deputy treasury secretary, visited Tokyo in June to pressure the Japanese government into resolving its bad loan crisis, fearing that an LTCB collapse would lead to a global financial panic.

The Keizo Obuchi government, which had helped to broker the talks between the banks, then investigated the nationalization of LTCB, which became effective by an act of the Diet on October 23, 1998.

Although LTCB was delisted from the TSE upon its purchase, Shinsei, which was relieved of the bad debts of its predecessor, had a successful initial public offering at 2004 and remains in operation today as a commercial bank.

Corporate planning head Takashi Uehara committed suicide in May 1999 shortly after his indictment was leaked to the public; Osaka branch manager Kazunori Fukuda followed suit days later.