Creditor Life-forms

Christian A. Gregory christian11 at mindspring.com
Sun Apr 23 10:33:44 PDT 2000



> On Thu, 20 Apr 2000, Brad De Long wrote:
>
> > But they've lost a whole decade of economic growth...
>
> Naw, just 3-4 years, at most. 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

Japan has lost significantly more than 3 or 4 years of growth. If, contrary to what's said most of the time, what's needed is simply for Japan to get up to some rate of growth that's self-sustaining, given it's current international position, then that means that, for every year under, say, 2.5% growth--which is every year but one or two in the 90's, I think--things get worse. And they have.

Japan may be harvesting others' growth, but they do a lot of that harvesting in greenbacks. So whatever "benefits" go to that also tie them to the fate of the dollar.

John Gulick wrote:

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 ..

Good take on the Japanese k-inflow dotcom bubble . . .


>From what I can tell, it's mostly hype, but partly true. Japan's own hi-tech
gurus talk in public like dotcom bubbleheads, for sure. But it is true that there is some reorganization in the financial realm going on--rewriting accounting rules, adopting Glass-Steagall type banking regulations, big bank mergers, etc. But people are mistaken if they think that the main bank relationships, for example, will die b/c of this. If anything, having seen what bank-corporate collusion did for the bubble, banks companies will be more prudent--maybe "smarter" so far as that goes. (Besides, Japanese banks understood the push to disintermediate a decade and a half ago--that's why they got into the stock market to begin with. This is no "revolution" for them.) Likewise, all this talk about the end of "lifetime employment" misses that point lifetime employment applied about a third of the Japanese workforce. Relatively high unemployment is important 'cause it signals the coming apart of the informal safety nets that the keiretsu used to keep people nominally employed in hard times.

All best Christian



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