The definition of a non-performing loan (NPL) differs across countries but the picture is definitely not pretty.

Nocera’s column on Monday contains some startling statistics from Goodman:

Fortunately it was also a question tackled Friday morning in a special conference call hosted by Nomura’s US banking analyst Brian Foran, Japan banking analyst Ken Takamiya, and Richard Koo from the Nomura Research Institute.

As widely reported this morning, the rating agency reviewed the National Audit Office’s report on local government debt and concluded that it underestimates banks’ NPL exposure.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has been on the case of restructured bank loans since March this year, when it fired off a letter asking financials to clarify their loan modifications. As a reminder, loan mods can change the terms of a loan for a borrower, giving them another chance to make good on the debt, but modified loans do have an unnerving tendency to redefault. In April, the US accounting board announced they’d be firming up rules on how banks account for and report Troubled Debt Restructurings (TDRs). The new guidance is expected to increase the amount of loans reported as TDRs on banks’ balance sheets once it comes into effect this Autumn.

By the end of 2009, however, the financial crisis had erupted and left Spain with a stock of unsold houses of almost 700,000. By 2010, the number of new houses being sold had dropped to 200,000.

Small problem — the township spent the loan, secured using a so-called local government investment vehicle (LGIV) without collateral, on completely unrelated development projects.

In it, the accounting firm estimates the region’s banks have more than €1,300bn of non-core loan assets, which are expected to take at least a decade to run off or dispose of. Complicating matters is the fact that the level of reported non-performing loans (NPLs) at the banks was still rising in 2010.