Commentary  A zombie is an aberration, something that should not exist in the real world. Yet in modern economies, such creatures do exist. Zombies were introduced to the economic jargon by Ricardo Caballero, Takeo Hoshi, and Anil Kashyap in their article, “Zombie lending and depressed restructuring in Japan” in 2008, where they named the unprofitable and indebted yet still operating firms in Japan as “zombie companies.” They found that, after the financial crash of the early 1990s, large Japanese banks kept money flowing to otherwise insolvent borrowers, aka zombies. The reason for this was that these large banks themselves were in dire straits. The financial crisis of the early 1990s had its roots in the deregulation of the financial sector in the early 1980s, and the extensive efforts of the Bank of Japan to limit the appreciation of the Yen with low-interest rates. These actions led to massive stock and …