With the industrial web of cross-shareholdings unraveling, major commercial banks remained net sellers of stocks for the fifth straight month in August.
Long-term credit banks, city banks and regional banks as a whole sold 376.6 billion yen more shares than they bought on the Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya stock exchanges, according to a weekly industry report. This roughly constituted a three-fold increase on the previous month's level, the report says.
It also brought their net sales over the first five months of fiscal 2001 to some 900 billion yen, up 260 billion yen over the same period in 2000.