>. Labor will be
>dumped despite any corrections to the contraction, with workers
>scrambling to get into new jobs with lower wages and fringes. This is
>why Japan has been able to hold its society together as it adjusts to
>the mammoth deflation that brought the yen gold price down by 60%
>since 1990. If this were instead a 60% contraction, there would be
>blood on the streets of Tokyo.
I take it Wanninski means by "If this were instead a 60% contraction", that Tokyo didn't try to resolve the crisis by pushing it mostly off on the workers, causing high unemployment. And by "blood on the streets", it's assumed he means the blood of his Japanese class comrades.
>We remain absolutely alone in our analysis, which led me to tell our
>conference-call participants that I felt like the fellow who broke
>the Japanese code and is having no luck getting the admirals off the
>golf course at Pearl Harbor.
"absolutely alone", oh boo hoo. Sounds like Wanninski would rather attack workers with inflation rather than with unemployment. It remains to see who gets "Pearl Harbored", Japanese workers or us here in the US. If capitalists and bureaucracy don't move in Japan, despite all the external pressure, then it will be us. We're certainly more structurally vulnerable.
And in a perverse way, I hope it is us. Japanese workers have had a pretty good deal as of late in the relative scale of things. It would be a shame to see it all blasted to bits.
-Brad Mayer