From: "Christian A. Gregory" <christian11 at mindspring.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Subject: bubble Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2000 09:34:35 -0600
Hey Rob,
Here's an MoF press release that I found that might help with your question. It details the balance of offshore accounts at the end of January 2000.
http://www.mof.go.jp/english/offshore/e1c007ap.htm
The table suggests that Japan's total offshore accounts are still positive (more assets than liabilities). (There is something about this table that I've a question about that maybe you or Doug or Max or Brad or someone can clarify: in one column, for example on assets, it gives a total number, and then a number "To non-residents," which is sometimes smaller than the total. In the case of securities both are 94.6 billion yen. My question: to what does this refer? How would you account for the difference between something "offshore" and "to a non-resident" [I would have assumed that these were the same.])
Or, if you look at the following page, you can see the movement of securities investment abroad for the month of January. Japanese investors dumped about 1.2 trillion yen in investments abroad. (I haven't yet been able to find a country-by-country breakdown). So it would appear that, despite Wall St.'s declared confidence that the Japanese situation won't harm them, the recent behavior of Japanese investors might be something to be concerned about.
http://www.mof.go.jp/english/shoutou/e1c009aq2.htm
All best Christian