>You betcha. The latest figures from the Nomuri Shimbun say that the
>Japanese postal savings system now has a grand total of 250 trillion yen
>in deposits sitting around and accumulating interest (up from 200 trillion
>as late as 1994). That's a cool $2 trillion in rocksolid liquidity, just
>itching to be spent on Mitsubishi's latest chip technology.
But it's not being spent on real world technology. I'm a bit mystified, Dennis, by how you're so scornful of Anglo-American rentiers, but see the accumulation of financial assets as evidence of Japanese economic might. Those postal savings balances suggest that the profitability of real-world Japanese capital is too low to entice them out of money form and into engagement with living labor. Of course everything could change; the U.S. bubble could break and Japan could recover from its decade of torpor. But right now Japan looks kind of weak, and those stagnant postal savings balances are evidence of that.
Doug