> that somebody was willing to take your note. Japan pays the "Japan
> Premium" when they borrow. There is, so far as I know, no "America
> Premium."
Yes there is. It's called long-term interest rates, and they're much, much higher in the US than Japan.
> How is it that nearly zero interest rates are not producing an economic
> boom in Japan?
Because effective demand is still being strangled by insufficient fiscal stimulus. You need low rates *and* the willingness to run deficits. Japan in 1998 is very much like the US in 1933; low rates aren't enough.
> You seem to think that there is this neo-socialist "real" industrial
economy
> underlying the E.U. and Japan onto which finance capitalism is grafted
> artificially. Not. It's all capitalism, all the time.
Multinational capitalism is not the same thing as state-monopoly capitalism. GE is not the same thing as Microsoft. The Mitsubishi keiretsu is not the same thing as CitiTravelers. They have different histories, structures, agendas, ideologies, strengths and weaknesses. In the Eighties the EC and East Asia were merely the workshops of the world; now, in 1998, they're also the bankers to the world. Don't ask me, ask Deutsche Bank, SG Paribas and BTM. But let me guess -- you just shorted your life savings on the continued decline of the euro, right?
-- Dennis