Iniciado por SolNaciente

En Japón les van a sobrar problemas. No sé ni por donde empezar.
Leyendo varios artículos y discutiendo con algún joven y no tan joven japonés, los problemas de los que me acuerdo ahora son:
- Jóvenes con ideas de consumo bastante cambiadas. Ha sido un gran schock para muchos empresarios japoneses el darse cuenta que el joven japones (de 18 a 32 tacos, digamos) no tienen interés en comprarse un coche. Japón depende muchísimo del consumo interno. Siempre se ha visto como pais exportador, pero depende menos de sus exportaciones que por ejemplo, Alemania.
- Interes nulo en política, muy poca gente va a votar. Los políticos en Japón están muy muy separados de la realidad y los japoneses muy ocupados con sus curros.
- Muchos viejos y pocos niños. Vale, nada nuevo. Teniendo en cuenta que cada vez hay mas familias "pobres" en Japón, es muy triste ver los pocos esfuerzos que hacen para ayudar a las familias numerosas. Ahora se han embarrado en una discusión sobre hasta que punto dar también ayudas a extranjeros con hijos que viven en Japón. Con "ayudas" me refiero exclusivamente a la "children allowance". Independientemente de lo que ganes, te dan ...cuanto era? 13.000 yenes por crio? Lo busco y lo pongo.
- Pocos quieren estudiar ingenierías o cosas por el estilo. Difícil y poco recompensado. Para rizar el rizo, muchas empresas han llevado al absurdo la "gerontocracia"...como se llama lo de ir avanzando según pasas años en la empresa? Tengo el cerebro licuado. Bueno, es igual. Resulta que eres un ingeniero de puta madre, te gusta tu trabajo y lo haces bien. Cumples 45 e inmediatamente te promueven y pasas a un puesto directivo, quieras o no quieras. Cada vez encuentran menos que ocupen los puestos que quedan vacantes.
- Muchos jóvenes tienen poco interés a entrar a trabajar como "fijos" en una empresa. Prefieren una ETT, que les paguen por horas y que se puedan cambiar facilmente si no les mola el curro.

Iniciado por SolNaciente

- En la medicina... montones de problemas. Bueno, ya ire posteando más.

Iniciado por Samuel_five

Pero que a nadie se le ocurra comparar a España con Japón ... En Japón "se podían permitir" el error ... En España NO ...

Japón es una super-potencia exportadora ...

No todos los Estados tienen la misma capacidad de endeudamiento-burbujil ... Si Japón puede pedir mil euros y devolverlos ... La España actual no tiene capacidad para devolver ni dos euros ... y ha pedido mil

Tenemos que cambiar mucho y empezar a ponernos las pilas ... Yo creo que podemos ... ¡YES, WE CAN!

Iniciado por SolNaciente

Leyendo varios artículos y discutiendo con algún joven y no tan joven japonés, los problemas de los que me acuerdo ahora son:
- Jóvenes con ideas de consumo bastante cambiadas. Ha sido un gran schock para muchos empresarios japoneses el darse cuenta que el joven japones (de 18 a 32 tacos, digamos) no tienen interés en comprarse un coche. Japón depende muchísimo del consumo interno. Siempre se ha visto como pais exportador, pero depende menos de sus exportaciones que por ejemplo, Alemania.

Once drawn to U.S. universities, more Japanese students staying home

By Blaine Harden
Sunday, April 11, 2010

TOKYO -- Takuya Otani would love an MBA from a top U.S. business school, but he won't apply. When he graduates from college in Tokyo next year, he'll pass on an American degree and attend graduate school in Japan.

"I am a grass-eater," Otani said wistfully, using an in-vogue expression for a person who avoids stress, controls risk and grazes contentedly in home pastures.

Once a voracious consumer of American higher education, Japan is becoming a nation of grass-eaters. Undergraduate enrollment in U.S. universities has fallen 52 percent since 2000; graduate enrollment has dropped 27 percent.

It is a steep, sustained and potentially harmful decline for an export-dependent nation that is losing global market share to its highly competitive Asian neighbors, whose students are stampeding into American schools.

Total enrollment from China is up 164 percent in the past decade; from India, it has jumped 190 percent. South Korea has about 76 million fewer people than Japan, but it now sends 2 1/2 times as many students to U.S. colleges.

Just one Japanese undergraduate entered Harvard's freshman class last fall. The total number of Japanese at Harvard has been falling for 15 years, while enrollment from China, South Korea and India has more than doubled.

Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust said that when she visited Japan last month, she met with students and educators who told her that Japanese young people are inward-looking, preferring the comfort of home to venturing overseas. They also told her they view the economic advantage of attending a U.S. college as questionable.

"An international degree is not as valued," Faust said she learned from her encounters here.

Looking for 'harmony'

The skepticism extends beyond students. At big Japanese companies, many bosses don't like what they see as the sometimes uppity and overly independent ways of American-educated young Japanese, said Tomoyuki Amano, chief executive of Tomorrow Inc., which publishes a magazine about foreign education.

Amano said many employers prefer the "harmony" that comes from hiring the locally educated, who they believe work longer hours, complain less and request fewer vacations.

Amano, 28, said he speaks from bitter personal experience.

After graduating six years ago with a degree in management from California State University, Chico, he returned to Tokyo and took a job with Hitachi, Japan's largest electronics manufacturer.

"I really felt that I could not question anyone who was older than me," Amano said. "I also learned that it was going to be hard to get a promotion or take a vacation. Promotions tend to go to those who attend the same Japanese schools as the bosses."

Bottom-line considerations are steering many young Japanese away from U.S. colleges, said Tadashi Yokoyama, chairman of the board of Agos Japan, a Tokyo company that prepares students to take language exams and other tests needed for admission to foreign schools.

"This is not a time in Japan for intellectual curiosity," said Yokoyama, who graduated from UCLA in the early 1980s. "You have to think about investment and return."

In the 1970s and '80s, when Japan's economy was booming, the bottom line did not matter for many young Japanese. It was fashionable, stimulating and affordable for them to travel the world, study English in foreign settings and attend college in the United States. Their parents had money, and jobs were plentiful when they came home.

The collapse of the bubble economy in the 1990s changed those calculations. And the construction inside Japan of more than 200 new universities has made it easy to find an affordable education without enduring jet lag and having to learn English.

At the same time, Japan's low birthrate is constricting college enrollment, both inside and outside the country. The number of children under the age of 15 has fallen for 28 consecutive years. The size of the nation's high school graduating class has shrunk by 35 percent in the past two decades.

"When you combine a big decrease in the student population with a big increase in the number of Japanese universities and couple that with rising tuitions in U.S. colleges, you can understand why priorities have changed," said Tokoyama.

A mixed experience

An exception to the trend: Some in corporate Japan still send promising young employees to graduate school in the United States. Eighty major companies pay Agos Japan to prep their workers for graduate schools in the United States and other countries.

When these employees return to Japan with MBAs and other advanced degrees, however, they often find that their companies don't know how to make use of their skills -- and that they are penalized for having stepped off the corporate ladder.

NTT Data, a major information technology company, sent Masaki Honda to UCLA for an MBA. But "during the two years I was gone, I was regarded as a net cost to the company," said Honda, who is now president of Agos Japan. "I lost seniority compared to my peers and my performance while I was in business school was evaluated as 'C' for mediocre."

For all the risks and frustrations of higher education in the United States, some young people remain willing to go.

Nobuko Tabata, 29, is heading off next fall to Philadelphia for the two-year MBA program at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

"I want to know the world's highest-level people," she said. "I want to be a higher-level manager. It would be easy for me to stay in Japan, but I need more."

Tabata, a certified public accountant who works for her family's transport company, has spent $25,000 and devoted the past two years to studying English, taking tests and polishing application essays. She is married to a CPA who works for Sony, who will probably remain in Japan.

She said she is eager to be challenged and to learn the latest skills in corporate management -- and ready to sleep just three or four hours a night. "I think I am a meat-eater." she said.



Special correspondent Akiko Yamamoto contributed to this report.

It is Japan we should be worrying about, not America

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Published: 5:33PM GMT 01 Nov 2009

Japan is drifting helplessly towards a dramatic fiscal crisis. For 20 years the world's second-largest economy has been able to borrow cheaply from a captive bond market, feeding its addiction to Keynesian deficit spending – and allowing it to push public debt beyond the point of no return.

The rocketing cost of insuring against the bankruptcy of the Japanese state is telling us that the model has smashed into the buffers. Credit default swaps (CDS) on five-year Japanese debt have risen from 35 to 63 basis points since early September. Japan has suddenly decoupled from Germany (21), France (22), the US (22), and even Britain (47).

Regime-change in Tokyo and the arrival of Yukio Hatoyama's neophyte Democrats – raising $550bn (£333bn) to help fund their blitz on welfare and the "new social policy" – have concentrated the minds of investors at long last. "Markets are worried that Japan is going to hit a brick wall: the sums are gargantuan," said Albert Edwards, a Japan-veteran at Société Générale.

Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), told the US Congress last week that the debt path was out of control and raised "a real risk that Japan could end up in a major default".

The IMF expects Japan's gross public debt to reach 218pc of gross domestic product (GDP) this year, 227pc next year, and 246pc by 2014. This has been manageable so far only because Japanese savers have been willing – or coerced – into lending for almost nothing. The yield on 10-year government bonds has been around 1.30pc this year, though they jumped to 1.42pc last week.

"Can these benign conditions be expected to continue in the face of even-larger increases in public debt? Going forward, the markets capacity to absorb debt is likely to diminish as population ageing reduces saving," said the IMF.

The savings rate has crashed from 15pc in 1990 to near 2pc today, half America's rate. Japan's $1.5 trillion state pension fund (the world's biggest) has become a net seller of government bonds this year, as it must to meet pay-out obligations. The demographic crunch has hit. The workforce been contracting since 2005.

Japan Post Bank is balking at further additions to its $1.7 trillion holdings of state debt. The pillars of the government debt market are crumbling. Little wonder that the Ministry of Finance has begun advertising bonds in Tokyo taxis, featuring Koyuki from The Last Samurai. If Japan's bond rates rise to global levels of 3pc to 4pc, interest costs will shatter state finances.

No one knows exactly when a country tips into a debt compound trap. But Japan must be close, even allowing for the fact that liabilities of the state Loan Programme (FILP) have fallen by 40pc of GDP since 2000.

"The debt situation is irrecoverable," said Carl Weinberg from High Frequency Economics. "I don't see any orderly way out of this. They will not be able to fund their deficit. There will be a fiscal shutdown, a pension haircut, and bank failures that will rock the world. It is criminally negligent that rating agencies are not blowing the whistle on this."

Mr Hatoyama inherited a country that was already hurtling into sovereign "Chapter 11". The Great Recession has eaten up 27pc in tax revenues. Industrial output is down 19pc, even after the summer rebound; exports are down 31pc; the economy is 10pc smaller today in "nominal" terms than a year ago – and nominal is what matters for debt.

Tokyo's price index fell 2.4pc in October, the deepest deflation in modern Japanese history. Real interest rates have risen 300 basis points in a year. It reads like a page from Irving Fisher's 1933 paper, Debt Deflation Causes of Great Depressions.

The Bank of Japan seems oddly insouciant. It will end its (feeble) quantitative easing in December by suspending purchases of corporate debt, much to the fury of the Finance Ministry.

"This is incredibly dangerous," said Russell Jones from the RBC Capital Markets. "The rate of deflation is shocking. The debt dynamics are horrible and there is the risk of a downward spiral."

Tokyo has let the yen appreciate violently – 90 to the dollar, 13 to the Chinese yuan – giving another twist to the deflation knife. Top exporters are below break-even cost, says RBS. The government could stop this, as it did in a wave of manic dollar purchases from 2003-2004. It could print money à l'outrance to stave off deflation. Yet it sits frozen, like a rabbit in the headlamps.

Japan's terrible errors are by now well known. It failed to jettison its mercantilist export model in time. It resisted the feminist revolution, leading to a baby strike by young women. It acquiesced in a mad investment bubble (like China now) in the 1980s, stealing growth from the future.

It wasted its immense fiscal firepower, scattering money for 20 years on half-baked spending projects to keep the economy afloat. QE was too little, too late, and this is the lesson for the West. We must cut borrowing drastically over the next decade, and offset this with ultra-easy monetary policy. Does Downing Street understand this? Does the White House? Does the European Central Bank? Clearly not.

Bond jitters as Japan launches yet another stimulus plan

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Published: 9:39PM GMT 08 Dec 2009

Japan has launched its fourth fiscal rescue package since the economic crisis began last year, spraying a further $81bn (£50bn) into the regions and on subsidies for "eco-cars" and refrigerators.

The spending blitz will lift debt issuance to a record $835bn this year and comes despite warnings by finance minister Hirohisa Fujii that Japan risks exhausting the patience of bond vigilantes.

"Japan's fiscal situation is serious. If we over-issue government bonds, there will be a loss of confidence," he said. There were already signs of investor fatigue at an auction for bonds yesterday, with yields rising as high as 2.23pc.

Mr Fujii said Tokyo must raise a further $112bn through an extra budget to pay for the stimulus measures.

Junko Nikiosha from RBS said markets are looking beyond the spending plan, fretting whether the Democrat-led coalition will be able to meet deficit targets in 2010 fiscal year.

"If the government fails to keep these promises, it will bring worries about government bond supply back to the market, calling for a fiscal risk premium," he said.

The package comes days after the Bank of Japan reversed plans for withdrawal of monetary stimulus, agreeing to extend emergency lending to firms by $115bn. Japan's economy bounced back over summer as companies rebuilt stocks but there are signs of fading momentum. Julian Jessop from Capital Economics said that growth may have stalled in the fourth quarter, citing a fall in Japan's Economy Watchers Survey to 33.9 in November.

The strong yen – though weaker over recent days – has left export giants such as Sony struggling to break even on foreign shipments.

While Japan can still raise debt cheaply in nominal terms, the cost is rising in real terms as deflation tightens its grip. Core inflation was minus 2.2pc in October.

The country must service a rapidly growing debt with a shrinking workforce and an economy that has contracted 10pc in yen terms since early last year.

While the state pension fund has been a captive buyer of government bonds in the past – holding 20pc of the total stock – it became a net seller this year to meet payout obligations.

The International Monetary Fund has warned Japan that it risks a sudden jump in debt funding costs. Gross public debt is expected to reach 227pc of GDP next year. Tax revenues collapsed 24pc in the first half. Corporate tax payments have since turned negative as firms claim rebates on losses.

Economists are watching events in Japan with macabre interest. The country has blazed the path of extreme Keynesian fiscal stimulus over the last two decades – with poor results – making it a laboratory case for how much debt a mature economy can take on before it suffocates.

Global bear rally will deflate as Japan leads world in sovereign bond crisis

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor
Published: 6:15AM GMT 04 Jan 2010

Milton Keynes will be vindicated. Lord Keynes will lose some of his new-found gloss. The Krugman doctrine that we should all spend our way back to health by pushing deficits to the brink of a debt spiral – or beyond the brink – will be seen as dangerous.

The contraction of M3 money in the US and Europe over the last six months will slowly puncture economic recovery as 2010 unfolds, with the time-honoured lag of a year or so. Ben Bernanke will be caught off guard, just as he was in mid-2008 when the Fed drove straight through a red warning light with talk of imminent rate rises – the final error that triggered the implosion of Lehman, AIG, and the Western banking system.

As the great bear rally of 2009 runs into the greater Chinese Wall of excess global capacity, it will become clear that we are in the grip of a 21st Century Depression – more akin to Japan's Lost Decade than the 1840s or 1930s, but nothing like the normal cycles of the post-War era. The surplus regions (China, Japan, Germania, Gulf ) have not increased demand enough to compensate for belt-tightening in the deficit bloc (Anglo-sphere, Club Med, East Europe), and fiscal adrenalin is already fading in Europe. The vast East-West imbalances that caused the credit crisis are no better a year later, and perhaps worse. Household debt as a share of GDP sits near record levels in two-fifths of the world economy. Our long purge has barely begun. That is the elephant in the global tent.

We will be reminded too that the West's fiscal blitz – while vital to halt a self-feeding crash last year – has merely shifted the debt burden onto sovereign shoulders, where it may do more harm in the end if handled with the sort of insouciance now on display in Britain.

Yields on AAA German, French, US, and Canadian bonds will slither back down for a while in a fresh deflation scare. Exit strategies will go back into the deep freeze. Far from ending QE, the Fed will step up bond purchases. Bernanke will get religion again and ram down 10-year Treasury yields, quietly targeting 2.5pc. The funds will try to play the liquidity game yet again, piling into crude, gold, and Russian equities, but this time returns will be meagre. They will learn to respect secular deflation.

Weak sovereigns will buckle. The shocker will be Japan, our Weimar-in-waiting. This is the year when Tokyo finds it can no longer borrow at 1pc from a captive bond market, and when it must foot the bill for all those fiscal packages that seemed such a good idea at the time. Every auction of JGBs will be a news event as the public debt punches above 225pc of GDP. Finance Minister Hirohisa Fujii will become as familiar as a rock star.

Once the dam breaks, debt service costs will tear the budget to pieces. The Bank of Japan will pull the emergency lever on QE. The country will flip from deflation to incipient hyperinflation. The yen will fall out of bed, outdoing China's yuan in the beggar-thy-neighbour race to the bottom. By then China too will be in a quandary. Wild credit growth can mask the weakness of its mercantilist export model for a while, but only at the price of an asset bubble. Beijing must hit the brakes this year, or store up serious trouble. It will make as big a hash of this as Western central banks did in 2007-2008.

The European Central Bank will stick to its Wagnerian course, standing aloof as ugly loan books set off wave two of Europe's banking woes. The Bundesbank will veto proper QE until it is too late, deeming it an implicit German bail-out for Club Med.

More hedge funds will join the EMU divergence play, betting that the North-South split has gone beyond the point of no return for a currency union. This will enrage the Eurogroup. Brussels will dust down its paper exploring the legal basis for capital controls. Italy's Giulio Tremonti will suggest using EU terror legislation against "speculators".

Wage cuts will prove a self-defeating policy for Club Med, trapping them in textbook debt-deflation. The victims will start to notice this. Articles will appear in the Greek, Spanish, and Portuguese press airing doubts about EMU. Eurosceptic professors will be ungagged. Heresy will spread into mainstream parties.

Greece's Prime Minister Papandréou will balk at EMU immolation . The Hellenic Socialists will call Europe's bluff, extracting loans that gain time but solve nothing. Berlin will climb down and pay, but only once: thereafter, Zum Teufel.

In the end, the Euro's fate will be decided by strikes, street protest, and car bombs as the primacy of politics returns. I doubt that 2010 will see the denouement, but the mood music will be bad enough to knock the euro off its stilts.

The dollar rally will gather pace. America's economy – though sick – will shine within the even sicker OECD club. The British will need the shock of a gilts crisis to shatter their complacency. In time, the Dunkirk spirit will rise again. Mervyn King's pre-emptive QE and timely devaluation will bear fruit this year, sparing us the worst.

By mid to late 2010, we will have lanced the biggest boils of the global system. Only then, amid fear and investor revulsion, will we touch bottom. That will be the buying opportunity of our lives.

Japan braves bond markets with high-risk plans, talks down the yen
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor
Published: 6:00AM GMT 08 Jan 2010

Japan has appointed its sixth finance minister in eighteen months and opted for yet another high-stakes shift in economic strategy, this time ditching its strong-yen policy and reverting to fiscal largesse in hopes of pulling the country out of deflationary perma-slump.

The change of tack by the world's second largest economy sparked jitters on Tokyo's bond markets and may have implications for the global currency system, leading to a revival of the yen "carry-trade" that helped fuel the last international asset bubble.

Deputy premier Naoto Kan is to take over the finance ministry. A high-spending populist and an advocate of radical stimulus measures, he is a stark contrast to the outgoing Hirohisa Fujii, the aging apostle of financial orthodoxy.

Mr Kan's opening gambit on Thursday was a call for devaluation, saying it would be "nice" if the yen were to weaken further to help exporters. He has in the past said 95 yen to the dollar - 2pc-3pc weaker than cuurently - is a tolerable level for the likes of Toyota, Toshiba, and Sony.

His appointment opens the door for outright intervention to ensure a weaker yen if necessary, adding Japan to the long list countries now intervening openly or covertly to hold down their currencies. These include China, Russia, Korea, Brazil, Taiwan, Indonesia, Switzerland, and arguably Britain – some using of capital controls to stop inflows of hot money.

Mr Kan is a fierce critic of the Bank of Japan, accusing the monetary authorities of sitting on their hands as the country slid into the deepest deflation in post-War history last year. "I think that is partly why he was given this position," said Neil Mellor from Bank of New York Mellon said.

The scourge of Japan's all-powerful officials, Mr Kan may try to break the Bank of Japan to his political will, demanding the sort of full-fledged quantitative easing seen in Britain and the US. Many economists agree that the bank has been strangely passive over the last year as GDP contracted by 10pc and the yen rocketed, pushing Japan deeper into deflation.

Mr Fujii resigned over ill-health but it is an open secret that he fell out with the ruling Democrats over plans for fresh welfare spending, fearing that fiscal extravagance could lead to a state funding crisis. Yields on 10-year government bonds (JGBs) have crept up 10 basis points over recent days, rising to 1.34pc on Thursday on doubts over Mr Kan's plans.

The budget deficit is already set to hit 9pc of GDP this year. The International Monetary Fund says gross public debt will reach 227pc of GDP this year, warning that Japan is nearing the limits of sustainability. While Tokyo has been able to borrow cheaply - barely above 1pc - this may not continue. The IMF said the sheer scale of the debt burden means that a modest rise in yields would cause havoc to state finances.

Japan can no longer count on a captive bond market. The savings rate has fallen from 14pc in 1990 to near 2pc today, below the US. The state pension fund became a net seller of JGBs last year as the country's demographic crunch began in earnest. The population has been declining since 2005, at an accelerating pace. It dropped by 75,000 last year to 126m. The growing debt must be serviced by a declining base.

The US rating agency Moody's says investors may demand a higher risk premium for Japanese debt unless the government can "articulate a credible medium-term deficit reduction plan".

Mr Kan appears deaf to such warnings. His immediate aim is to prime-pump the economy before Diet elections next summer, perhaps breaching the cross-party understanding that new debt issuance should be limited to $475bn in the coming year.

Gregg Gibbs from RBS said Japan sticks out like a sore thumb on the global stage "Fiscal concerns dog most major economies, but Japan is the only one not discussing the need to start winding deficits back," he said.

Dai-Ichi Mutual unveils biggest share offers since the Great Recession

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor
Published: 5:56PM GMT 23 Mar 2010

Dai-Ichi Mutual Life in Japan is to launch the world's biggest public offering since the Great Recession, raising $11bn (£7.3bn) in the latest sign of returning confidence in global markets.

The country's second biggest life insurer will follow the path of mutuals in the West by transforming itself into a joint stock company, with ambitious plans to expand overseas.

It is the largest share offer in Japan since 1998 and the largest worldwide since the Visa's $20bn sale in March 2008, just before the global crisis caused corporations to batten down the hatches. The Japanese market for IPO's almost completely shut last year, with issues reaching just $603m according to Dealogic.

A total of 10m shares will be issued at $1,550 each, with 7.2m will be sold to Japanese and foreign investors and the rest retained by policy-holders. It will be the most widely held stock in the country.

Mizuho Financial and other Japanese banks have lined to gobble up large chunks of the issue, continuing a practice of equity holdings that has proved a mixed blessing in the past. The cross-holdings in the Japanese corporate and banking system tend to let problems fester.

Japan's economy has rebounded briskly after its calamitous contraction in late 2008 and early 2009, lifted by surging demand in China, Korea and dynamism in emerging Asia. Growth was 3.8pc at an annual rate in the fourth quarter.

However, the closely-watched "GDP deflator" reached a record low of minus 2.8pc, suggesting that underlying deflationary forces are still tightening their grip. Minutes from the latest meeting of the Bank of Japan show that some members fear that accelerating price falls are becoming "widespread". They said the bank must be ready "to act swiftly and decisively" to stem deflation if needed

Under government pressure, the Bank of Japan has already reversed course on plans to exit quantitative easing. It relaunched its programme of debt purchases in December, and agreed this month to double the volume.

The Greek debt crisis has caused the Hatoyama government to fret over Japan's equally high level of public debt. The IMF expects gross debt to reach 225pc of GDP and net debt to be 110pc "Going forward, the market's capacity to absorb debt is likely to diminish as the population reduces savings inflows," said the Fund.

Yoshito Sengoku, the national strategy minister, said on Wednesday that Japan is drawing up plans for debt reduction plan with a clear "numerical target".

Iniciado por vagabundo

yo creo que se le compara en el sentido de decir: si eso ha pasado en Japón con la burbuja aquí nos vamos a la mierda directamente por los siglos.

Lo cachondo es que estamos en el comienzo de una larga crisis inmobiliaria todavía con precios de burbujón del año 2005, y hay gente comprándose el piso o pensando en hacerlo.

Individuals trading stocks are sensing that the markets may
have turned upwards for a prolonged period, and are now
re-entering the market enmasse. The Nikkei says that
trading values at the top five web brokers has surged 25%
to JPY8.5trn in March over February. Apparently this is
part of an overall steady recovery from a 5-year low last
November. ***Ed: The fact is that as government stimulus
spending works its way through the system, there is indeed
a recovery underway that will last at least while the
stimulis spending does -- maybe for the rest of this year?
This appears to be providing individual investors with
enough time to consider playing the market again. What
happens next year once the stimulus spending ends and
interest rates head upwards is of course anyone's guess.
Overall the markets will continue to be jittery as people
keep that in the back of their minds.** (Source: TT
commentary from nikkei.com, Apr 6, 2010)

Realtor Miki Shoji issued its monthly office vacancies
report last week and said that companies are still
retrenching and cutting costs, thus causing a slump in
office space demand. According to Miki, the average vacancy
rate for Chiyoda-ku, Chuo-ku, Minato-ku, Shinjuku-ku, and
Shibuya-ku was 8.75% in February, the highest since Miki
started recording office vacancy levels in 1989. Those
companies that are doing well are moving upmarket without
spending extra cash. This is apparently the case behind
Google's move from the Shibuya Cerulean Tower to Mori's
Roppongi Hills, where they are reportedly paying similar
rent. (Source: TT commentary from businessweek.com, Mar 29,
2010)

While all the focus is on China and impending takeovers of
Australian resources and food companies, in fact the real
M&A wave for Down Under is coming from Japan, accordingly
to a report in The Australian newspaper. Japanese direct
investment during 2008 amounted to Au$36bn, far outweighing
the Au$3.05bn in direct investment by the Chinese. A review
of investments would include Kirin's takeover of Lion
Nathan (Au$3.3bn) and National Foods (Au$2.9bn), Asahi's
takeover of Schweppes Australia, Suntory's takeover of
Frucor, and numerous significant stakes in uranium, gas,
coal, oil, utilities, and paper. ***Ed: This of course
confirms what we speculated on last year, that Japanese
companies are seen at least in part by most Australian
firms as being more desirable partners/owners than are the
Chinese. While this may not be fair, it certainly gives
Japanese firms safe haven to grow abroad, not that their
home markets are stagnant.** (Source: TT commentary from
theaustralian.com.au, Apr 8 2010)

Iniciado por SolNaciente

Sabia lo de la deuda brutal, pero leyendolo desde fuera (y no desde Japón) la cosa parece muy muy grave. En Japon en la tele siempre te ponían diagramas de como iban a solucionarlo todo de puta madre.

13/04/2010: 9:25:39 h. Dólar - yen Serenity markets

El dólar sube frente al yen de manera repentina tras comentarios del partido en el poder en Japón, que no se han "cortado" un pelo en decir que el yen debería estar a 120 contra el dólar...