>Japan has grown in the Nineties, just sorta
>slowly, and their currency has appreciated impressively. Being a creditor
>economy means, you harvest the growth in other people's economies. This
>worked so well for the US for 50 years that Japan and the EU are now
>getting in on the act.
>
>Dennis
Dennis, I beg of you:
Japanese finance K flowing across the Pacific has allowed the short-term survival of U.S. dot-coms whose whole "business model" is to barter web-site advertising space w/other dot-coms (i.e. Japanese liquidity injections into the U.S. economy have propped up scores of companies/investors whose flourishing has nothing to do w/increasing productivity), right ? I can think of few or no other explanantions for continued U.S. economic expansion in the last 2 or 3 years (after the first time Greenspan uttered the words "irrational exuberance"). There might be more demand for Cisco routers and switches as a consequence of the e-commerce "revolution," and the turnover time of K is sped up w/B2B web sites allowing firms to place more orders w/suppliers on a given business day (and so on), but an economic "revolution" built on replacing bricks-and-mortar with clicks-and-mortar hardly seems to be a sound basis for long-term capital accumulation. All the new hand-held micro-computer gadgets like Palm Pilots are mainly used by yuppies -- hell, in the Bay Area, by convenience store clerks -- to check the value of their stock portfolios -- stock portfolios whose value is over-inflated b/c of unrealistic expectations about how many hand-held gadgets will be sold. And so on. It's a weird house of mirrors. Trying to pin a value-theoretic explanation on it, all I can come up w/is U.S. bubble prosperity is propped up by the balance of current accounts deficit. And that's it.
Is the media hype about the death of Japan Inc. (MITI-LDP-industrial/financial conglomerates) just that, hype ? The San Jose Mercury News loves to rave about Japan's new libertarian high-tech buccaneers who prefer stock markets to big banks, temporary consultants to lifetime employees, "Western" individualism to "Asian" paternalism, blah-de-blah ...
John Gulick