From: DANIEL.DAVIES at flemings.com Date: Tue, 7 Dec 1999 19:30:20 +0000
It's reading ill-thought-out guff like this that reminds me why I stopped buying the FT in the first place (a survey of the nearest seven stockbrokers reveals that myself, the head of insurance and the head of banking have all given up on the FT within the last year!!!).
Financial Times - December 7, 1999
JAPAN'S JUNKIE ECONOMY IS IN NEED OF ANOTHER FIX By Paul Abrahams in Tokyo
<snip purely factual material>.
>So how is it possible for the economy to be so weak given the amount
>of money that has been pumped into it? Since August 1992 the
>government has announced 10 supplementary spending packages worth
>=A5120,000bn ($84.3bn).
>The problem is not the quantity of the spending, but its quality.
>Decisions about supplementary spending are often based on political
>rather than economic considerations and many projects add little to
>long term economic growth.
--??? Hasn't someone told this guy about that thing they call "the business cycle?". Or has Keynes gone out of fashion and I was too wrapped up in myself to notice? What in the name of thunder has whether or not projects "add little to long term economic growth" got to do with _the_last_quarter_'s economic growth. Which was the point of the article, right? Otherwise it's just a piece of more or less mindless Japan-bashing, right?
>Take the island of Ikitsuki, off Kyushu in western Japan. This
>community of just 7,000 inhabitants has a brand new bridge linking it
>to its neighbouring island and three ports - one newly constructed,
>and almost empty.
Oh those silly bridges! Oh those silly brown people! If only they would employ clever FT journalists to tell them where to carry out their regional development!
>It is far from clear how long Japan can afford to continue paying for
>its fiscal spending addiction.
Balls. (and indeed I detect the spoor of the known idiot Ed Balls in this thesis). It is crystal clear how long Japan can afford to continue paying, and the answer is "pretty nearly forever".
>Gross debt is already 130 per cent of
>gross domestic product, the worst in the Organisation for Economic
>Cooperation and Development, and rising fast.
AAAAAAAARRRGHHH!!!! If I see one more repetition of this meaningless damn statistic, I swear I'll eat my own trousers in frustration. The Gross debt of Japan, compared to the flow of GDP, is a number which is utterly uninformative about Japan's ability to pay its debts.
>But any detoxification is likely to painful, involving forced
>lay-offs and much higher unemployment, at least in the short-term, to
>build the foundations for more sustainable growth.
Chrikey, I knew things were desperate at the FT, but I didn't think they'd reached the stage of employing actual, physical, Austrianists quite yet. Ye gods, etc, etc.
I got offered a job by these jokers last year. Not wild horses, etc, etc. [shudder]
dd